


The Sky Pirate's Magical Odyssey

by FoxOnPie



Category: The Owl House (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Disability, Disabled Character, Disabled Character of Color, F/F, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Mythology - Freeform, Mythology References, Physical Disability, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:21:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25586620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FoxOnPie/pseuds/FoxOnPie
Summary: Luz Noceda was a young inventor who always had her head in the clouds, even for a third-rate sky pirate. Nothing she did in her world could get people to appreciate her inventions, but maybe she'd be able to get some recognition in a world that, oddly enough, was the exact opposite of her own. Owl House with sort-of steampunk!Luz.Now with a Tv Tropes page! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/TheSkyPiratesMagicalOdyssey
Relationships: Amity Blight/Luz Noceda, Emira Blight/Viney, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Comments: 89
Kudos: 188





	1. Lots of Steam, Only a Moderate Amount of Punk

The cool night sky had its normal silence broken by the sound of propellers in action. First, there was one set, then there were two, then three, then two again when one of the planes started to stall, but with a good smack of the wrench, it was working just fine again and would never crash into the ground while everyone else did what they were supposed to. That being said, Luz had lost a lot of air in trying to get her plane to work, so she needed to hurry back to the rest of the Laputas if she didn't want another earful after the haul.

"You got this, Luz, you got this," was her attempt at reassuring herself as she flew back in with the rest of the Laputas, their planes now in the dozens. As she flew through a cloud and did what she could to ignore the resulting splashes of water, even the ones that fell on her arm, their target came into view: the luxurious cruise blimp of the local dukedom's wealthiest wealthy elite. "You still got this, Luz, you still got this. Just go in with everyone, rob these guys alongside everyone, and don't blow yourself up alongside everyone. Also, try not to blow yourself up in general, but if it's going to happen, don't drag other people into it, you hear me?"

"We _all_ hear you, Luz." That was her mom's voice. It wasn't in Luz's head because she only ever heard her mom telling her not to do something when she was in her head, it was loud and clear and a part of the air. Which meant she was hearing it in real life. Which meant she left her speaker on and broadcasted all of her self-encouragement to the entire crew. Again.

"Now I kind of want to blow myself up," Luz said, hitting herself in the head with her hand in spite of the pain it caused her to do so. She ignored said pain and flew into position with the rest of the crew, everyone launching their planes' grappling hook anchors into the base of the blimp in unison; Luz couldn't remember the last time she managed to pull that off, but she wasn't going to jinx it by congratulating herself. She was late with the zipline through the window because she needed to strap to her back the invention that would blow everyone's goggles off with its brilliance, but she managed to get there with only a few seconds of a delay, so it was probably fine.

"Get your gears in motion, Luz! We need every hand on deck!" It was not fine in the slightest; she didn't know what she expected.

"Sorry, Captain Hal! I'm on it right now!"

"Just try not to—Wait, what is that on your back? Luz, I swear to God—" Luz ignored him as she drew her revolver from her hip and ran through the fanciful hall as she turned its key and dodged attacks from the white-robed guardsmen. One jumped in front of her and swung at her with an extendable ax. Luz dodged by a hair's breadth—she really didn't need a fourth cut on her cheek—just as she had finished turning her key, allowing her to blast him back with an explosive round.

_Yes, I blew someone up who was_ supposed _to get blown up! The world is my oyster now!_ Luz thought as she jumped over the fallen guard and turned its key again. Another explosive round soon made its way into the fight, and more rounds from the rest of the crew made their way in as well, hitting everyone in their path. No one was getting hurt because of anything she did, so it was a good mission, so far.

Luz and some of the other Laputas made their way to the central hall of the cruise blimp where all the wealthy guests were running for their lives from the Laputas who were already there, as was more than warranted. Off in a corner and being ignored by everyone, Luz caught sight of Duchess Claes and her bisexual polyamorous harem, the wealthiest people on the entire blimp. Perfect. They were going after everyone, but bisexual polyamorous harems always had the most money and could be ransomed off for the most, so whoever stopped them from leaving would be the big hero of the night.

_And that hero will be me!_ Luz thought. _Well, it will be once I break out my latest bad boy that definitely will not explode in anyone's face._ Luz removed the aforementioned bad boy from her back and unwrapped its clothed wrapping, revealing a cannon-like device that most people would view as being excessively large and a series of valves most people would feel didn't need to exist, but those people didn't know anything about design.

"Okay, you high-flying socialites you, prepare to—" Luz was cut off when she was forced to jump out of the way of a particularly muscular guard's electrified bardiche. He rambled on about something along the lines of how sky scum like them would never get away with anything, but all Luz could think about was how he was muscular to an almost comical degree. Sure, the bardiche was a heavy weapon, but it didn't require that much muscle power. The man was clearly trying too hard to look tough in a society that didn't warrant that.

In the middle of all of that, the guard swung at Luz again, and much to her own surprise, she was paying enough attention to jump out of the way, though her latest bad boy ended up taking the hit and received a deep cut as it was knocked over.

"Hey! No fair!" The guard swung at Luz again, but that time, Luz pulled her goggles down over her face, which meant it was time to get serious. The guard swung at her right, but she caught his weapon with the three-pronged hand of her metal prosthetic and absorbed the voltage thanks to the insulation she built into it. Then, with a mighty yell that had to be worthy of a sky pirate, she ripped the bardiche out of his hands, jabbed him in the face with the butt of the weapon, and sent him flying with an explosive shot from her revolver while he was still reeling in pain.

"Luz, did you just _win_?" Captain Hal asked. As the realization hit her, all Luz could do was nod with excitement. "Well all right, then! Everyone, grab a fat cat, and let's make bank!" Everyone raised their weapons at Captain Hal's command and charged towards Duchess Claes and her bisexual polyamorous harem. Luz might have lost the chance to grab them herself, but she could still be happy that she could end the night with everyone happy.

Then her latest bad boy started beeping and Luz's eyes widened. It wasn't supposed to be doing that; the guard must have caused a malfunction when he tore into it. Things never went well when her inventions started malfunctioning, so if she had any hope of keeping everything good between her and the crew, she needed to grab it.

Unfortunately, Luz was too slow at getting to that, and her latest bad boy, the rocket-powered net launcher, started firing off nets in random directions, yet somehow every Laputa other than herself ended up in a net. The only saving grace was from how the eventual explosion wasn't in anyone's face, though even that was undermined by Captain Hal yelling at her as he was electrified by her net.

"The electricity seemed like a good idea at the time, and it's really only bad for instances just like these ones," Luz said.

"You mean the ones you _always_ cause?!" Captain Hal shouted as he was shocked once more. Everyone who they were supposed to be robbing cheered for Luz's screwup. Because of course, they did.

"We're saved! We're truly saved! Oh, I knew we could count on Luz Noceda to save us!" Duchess Claes said as she jumped with joy alongside her bisexual polyamorous harem.

"What? No! I'm not saving you! I'm here to steal all your money and get filthy rich, honest!" Luz cried.

"No, no you're not," said one of the members of Duchess Claes' bisexual polyamorous harem. "The metal arm, the three little scars spread across the forehead and nose, the flight suit with the kitty cat ears," the hood of her dark purple vest and pants combo was supposed to have tiger ears, not kitty cat ears, "the wash-away blue streak in the hair—"

"Because life is dark!"

"Yes, you're Luz Noceda, the sky pirate who sabotages other sky pirates with her adorable clumsiness!"

"My clumsiness is _not_ what makes me adorable, and I'm not clumsy!" Luz swung her arms in frustration and accidentally knocked a smoke grenade loose from her belt. It bounced around until it eventually exploded in front of Captain Hal, who was seconds away from cutting himself free before that. "This is an isolated incident, I swear."

"Whatever you say, dear," Duchess Claes said. Just then, the sounds of airhorns started to fill the air, a sign that the sky police were on their way. "Oh, and now we can escape without issue. Thank you, Luz Noceda. You truly are a great help to all who are plagued by sky pirates!" Duchess Claes and her bisexual polyamorous harem fled the central hall while singing more praises of Luz that she didn't want to hear, and the other guests were soon to follow until Luz was left all alone.

She wasn't left alone in silence, however. Between the continual electric shocks of her nets and her own laughter done in a poor attempt at downplaying her own stupidity, there was plenty of noise to be found.

* * *

"You know, I think the fact that I beat up that super buff guard should count for something here. He was _clearly_ their last line of defense, so there was no hope for anyone once he went down." That was how Luz decided to make her case to Captain Hal once they had all returned to their flagship, the Nausicaa, in defeat.

"And yet here we are, still completely penniless. Why is that? Because your infernal contraption ruined the entire operation! _Again_!" Captain Hal said.

"But Captain, this is, like, the one time when it wasn't my fault! If that guy didn't break it, nothing would have happened!"

"But something _did_ happen, _Mija_ , and it happened because you didn't do what you were supposed to do. Again," her mom said, just sounding disappointed with her. Luz would rather have Captain Hal yell at her for an entire year than listen to five more seconds of that.

"I just wanted to show everyone that something I did could actually work out. What's wrong with that?"

"The fact that it never does, Luz. Every time you try and make improvements no one asked for, all you do is make things worse," Captain Hal said. "When we were raiding that diamond mine, the giant drill you built nearly collapsed the entire mine."

"But it didn't, and isn't that what matters?"

"You got us attacked by a pack of sky wolves because you destroyed the refrigeration system when you working on that freeze cannon thing."

"Freeze _ray_. The science behind a freeze cannon would just be ridiculous."

"Why does it matter when all you have to show for it is a pile of junk?" There was no good way for Luz to answer that. "You've melted propellers, caused multiple blackouts in the span of a single day, accidentally broadcasted our location to the sky police while messing around with the loudspeakers, and I don't think I need to remind you, of all people, of what happened when you tried to increase the engine's power output."

He didn't, not when the heavy reminder hung off of what was barely left of her right arm nearly every day for the past four years.

"I put the fires out," Luz said.

"You made them worse!"

"Worse? Or _better_?" Captain Hal just glared at her. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I thought that would do, but—I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry. Sorry for giving you so many chances you didn't deserve. That's why first thing in the morning, you're being transferred to the land division of the Laputas."

"The land division?!" Luz would not have felt ashamed about vomiting right then and there. "You can't do that! Those guys never even rob people. All they do is pick potatoes and debate the speed at which democracy should be introduced in a post-Collapse society, and I will _not_ get into that again, I just won't!"

"You should have thought about that before you cost us our biggest score of the year."

"Mom, do something! You're second-in-command, so start a mutiny or something!"

"I'm not going to—Luz, the Captain isn't wrong," her mom said. She still sounded disappointed, and Luz still hated everything about that.

"What?"

"Look, you know I love you and how passionate you are about your inventing and tinkering, but we're doing serious things here, so if it's going to keep causing trouble, then maybe it would be best if you had some space from the crew. Just until you work out the exploding kinks in them, okay?" There it was, plain as day: even her own mother thought she was a burden on everyone.

"Fine. I'll go." There was nothing else for Luz to say other than that, and there was nothing else for her to do than storm out and slam the door behind her.

* * *

Try as she might, Luz found herself too angry to sleep, so when the sun came up, she was able to greet it with an angry expression she had been wearing all night long.

"They've got some nerve, you know," Luz said to no one in particular, although it might have been the sun she was talking to. "Mom, Captain Hal, Chad from accounting, all the miscellaneous people in the crew, who do they think are, anyway? Acting like they need to get rid of me just because of a few explosions. How many scientists do they think got their careers off the ground _without_ blowing themselves up a few times? It's a short list, I'll tell you that! I'm not doing anything wrong, but they still just, just—" Luz punched her bedroom wall and made a dent with her prosthetic.

This was where trying to make something of yourself led to, evidently.

"Fine. If they don't want me around, then I don't—the point is that I'm out of here." Luz grabbed her toolbox and made sure that in addition to all the essential tools, it had the last photo she and her mother took together before she lost her arm. "Good. All set. Maybe I'll be able to install a potato picking mode on this thing while I'm there." With that last remark to no one but the sun, Luz made for the door to begin what was most likely the beginning of a rather dull and dreary life with not nearly enough explosions to be worth anything.

Only to have it stopped by the sight of an owl carrying a bag of random junk walking past her door.

"Um, hello. Who are you?" Luz asked the owl, though she didn't know why. The owl just stared at her and hooted. "Are you robbing us? You know we're pirates, right? We're supposed to do the robbing, not the other way around." The owl just stared at her and hooted. "Why do I even care? These guys are jerks, so go ahead and plunder to your heart's content! Like I care!" Luz stepped away from the owl and headed for the docking bay, but she stopped when her toolbox fell to the ground. It would have been one thing if she had just dropped it, but she was holding onto it too tightly for something like that to happen.

The tightness with which she was holding onto it was irrelevant, of course, when one took into account the fact that the arm she was holding onto it with was no longer attached to her body.

"What?" Luz turned around and saw the owl holding onto her arm in its beak. "What?" The owl tossed the arm into the bag and closed up the bag with a knot. "What?!" Not wanting to repeat herself a fourth time, Luz jumped at the owl, only for it to jump over her, bag in beak, and start flying away. "Come back here! That's my favorite arm, you jerk!"

Luz picked her toolbox up with her left hand and chased after the owl. Unfortunately, the owl was surprisingly fast for its small stature, so Luz was never able to rightfully grab it out of the air. She kept chasing the owl around until the two of them ended up at the docking bay, at which point Luz was starting to feel rightfully exhausted.

"Give. Me. Back. My. Arm." The owl just hooted at her as it pressed the button to open the docking bay. A gust of wind flew into the Nausicaa that nearly knocked Luz over, and when it started to die down, she was able to catch sight of what appeared to be a glowing with a yellow eye floating in the sky outside the Nausicaa. The owl started flying outside and the door started to open, so whatever it was, it was clearly designed to take the owl away from there and back to wherever it came from.

"Oh no, you're not getting away that easy!" Luz pulled her goggles down over her face, pulled her revolver off her waist, and used her mouth to turn the key until it was ready to be fired, upon which a shot was sent out above to knock one of the gliders down to the ground. "Damage looks negligible, so that's good. Can't waist any more time, though." Luz unfolded the glider and propped up all seven feet of it for proper use. She then jumped onto the metal platform and pressed the start button on the underbelly of the roof to get the propellers started. Gliders were meant to be activated while you were already in the air, but with everything that had been happening, Luz didn't care about scuffing the floor of a ship full of people who didn't even want her around.

All she cared about was getting even one win; that's all there was to it.

"Get back here!" Luz was shouting at the top of her lungs as her glider flew out towards the owl, though a lot of that might have been due to the stress of having to wrap her entire body around one handle while still holding onto her toolbox. Nevertheless, she flew for the owl who had wronged her, and even when it went through the mysterious floating door, she still chased after it, even though that resulted in her going through the door, as well. She didn't care about that, not in the slightest.

Wherever the owl was going had to be better than where she was leaving.

* * *

**I was browsing the show's subreddit the other day when I saw a drawing of a steampunk-esque Luz, and that immediately made me think, "** _**The Owl House** _ **, but Luz comes from a steampunk-esque world". And then, because I have no impulse control, I actually wrote the thing in just two days, which is something I don't usually do, but here we are. Yay? Yay.**


	2. Welcome to the Demon Realm

The door the owl flew through was the strangest piece of technology Luz had ever seen, even compared to the stuff she would make. The second she entered it, it looked as if she had been transported to some dark void with only a minimal amount of light coming from seemingly nowhere. It was almost as if she and the owl had been transported to some strange space. Luz had assumed that something like that would be happening, for someone to actually make something as highly advanced and purely theoretical as transportation was amazing, in and of itself.

It was also annoying because she wanted to be the one to finally crack it, not someone who would train an owl to steal prosthetic limbs off of people. Now she really had to sock it to whoever was behind this.

"Gotta catch that owl first. A lot easier to sock it to people with two hands," Luz said. Her glider was going at full power, but the distance between her and the owl never decreased in the slightest. As they kept flying and gliding, another door identical to the first one appeared within the confines of the void. It opened up to reveal a bright light with some sort of environment peeking through, though Luz couldn't completely make it out. It didn't look like anywhere she had ever been before, but the owl was flying there, so that meant she was going there, as well.

Luz barely looked back as the second door closed behind her.

* * *

The second Luz's vision returned to her, she saw that she had flown into some sort of tent lined with a random assortment of items undoubtedly pilfered from other people. She had no idea how she ended up inside somewhere, but it was clear that she needed to stop before she crashed into something, so she pulled down on her glider the best a one-armed girl could manage—which wasn't very good—to decrease her speed. The decrease in speed came, but it was far too late, and she crashed and bounced across the ground in an almost comical fashion before ultimately crashing into a cabbage merchant's cart of cabbages.

_If I had a nickel for every time this happened_ , Luz thought. As the cabbage merchant with oddly pointy ears' yelling fell on deaf ears, Luz folded up her glider, shoved it under her armpit, and marched back over to the tent she flew out of. In front of the tent was a table with a cash register and a few bookshelves filled with more assorted items.

"Oh, you didn't die. Good for you." The thieving owl was standing on top of the table while an elderly woman in a red dress with sharp teeth and the same kind of pointy ears as the cabbage merchant who was still yelling at her—she must be near some sort of toxic waste dump. "Don't know what a human's doing here, but I never turn away a customer, no matter how weird-looking they might be, so—"

"I am not buying whatever you're selling! Your pet stole from me!" Luz interjected.

"Sorry kid, but once something's in the bag, you no longer have any legal claim to it. That's how we do things here. Of course, that's not to say I wouldn't be able to part with it for a few Snails," the old lady said with a sly smirk.

"You can't just—"

"Sure I can! So, what am I selling back to you at a definitely fair price? This plastic bed filled with baby glaciers?" She was holding up an ice tray. "This weird egg that just has a bunch of dust inside of it?" She was holding up a baseball. "This—I don't know, some sort of fancy paperweight? This should probably be extra, come to think of it." She was holding up a telegraph key.

"No, no, and no! It's my arm! Just give me back my arm!" Luz shook her stump around to emphasize her frustration.

"Why would I have an—Oh." The old lady finally pulled out Luz's prosthetic, and it seemed like she made the connection between it and Luz's stump. "Huh. Don't see that every day. Don't you humans usually have two arms, not one and a—one and a sixth, I want to say?"

"It's a long story that doesn't make me look good at all, but that's not important! That's _my_ arm, and I shouldn't have to buy it back with some weirdo currency I've never even heard of! Don't make me blow you up for it!" Luz put her toolbox and glider down and reached for her revolver. It was all a bluff, but considering that she actually gave back her arm, it worked far better than she thought it would, as in at all. "Really? Just like that."

"Yep, just like that. You clearly need it, and it seems like _someone_ forgot that we don't take things people will miss." The owl hooted with a tone of remorse before the old lady started petting it. "Aw, I can't stay mad at you, Owlbert. You only took it because it was shiny, right? I get that. Who can resist shiny, shiny things, right? Hey kid, you really need that thing?"

"Yes, yes I do, so thanks, even though you _were_ the one who took it in the first place," Luz said as she slipped her arm underneath her shirt sleeve and fastened it into place.

"Eh, probably for the best. Don't know where I'd put the thing, anyway." The old lady picked up Owlbert and placed him on top of a wooden staff. She spun him around a couple of times and he seemed to turn into a wooden ornament attached to the staff.

It was certainly something.

"So you only take things people won't miss?" Luz asked.

"That's right. Call it a thief's code or whatever, but it's how I run my business," the old lady said. The cabbage merchant was yelling even louder, but Luz kept choosing to ignore it.

"Nice. As a sky pirate, I can respect a little honor among thieves."

"Sky pirate? Well, that explains the weird flying machine you came in on. You do a lot of pillaging and plundering yourself, kid?"

"Yeah, of course. I'm, like, all about robbing people and sticking it to the man and junk. Yeah, that's totally me." The cabbage merchant was yelling even louder, but Luz kept choosing to ignore it. "Anyway, are you some kind of eccentric, super brilliant scientist lady?"

"Eccentric? Yes. Super brilliant? Also yes. Beautiful? Most definitely." Luz was pretty sure she didn't say "beautiful". "But scientist? Ha! Like I'd be caught up in something dumb like that." The cabbage merchant was yelling even louder, but Luz kept choosing to ignore it.

"Science isn't dumb; it's the exact opposite of dumb! So what, did you just steal that teleportation device, then? How does that even exist?"

"My what? Don't you recognize a dimensional gateway when you see one?"

"A dimensional whatway?" Nothing about either of those words made any amount of sense, yet the old lady said them as if they were fact. No one where she lived would ever do something like that, so that begged the question of where she was for something like that to be such an easy to make statement.

"Hey! Listen to me when I'm talking to you!" The cabbage merchant was right in Luz's face now; at that point, it was more or less impossible for her to ignore him. "Look at my cart! Look at my cabbages! They're all ruined, and someone has to pay for it!"

"I don't think I have whatever passes as money here."

"Then you, Eda! She's your human pet, you have to be responsible for her!" Luz didn't know why he was pointing out that she was human, nor did she get why he called her a pet.

"For starters, she's not mine, so I'm not responsible for what she does." the old lady now identified as Eda said. "Plus, with her being a human and all, I don't know if our laws even apply to her."

"Fine! Maybe I'll just call the Emperor's Coven and have them sort things out with the both of you!"

"Hey, come on, I'm sure that if we just sit down and start a dialogue, we can—Flashbang!" Luz threw her metal hand in front of the cabbage merchant and used the voice command to trigger a flash of light from the light bulb embedded into the palm. The cabbage merchant was blinded and fell back right into his own spilled produce.

"Nice job, kid. I was just gonna hit him over the head, but that works, too. Didn't know humans could do magic."

"Hey, a real pirate can't have the authorities on their trail, after—did you day magic? This? That was just something I rigged up with a lightbulb."

"A light… bulb? I don't know what that's supposed to be, but you can tell me on the ride out of here." Eda slammed her staff against the ground and in an instant, all of her stuff—including a suitcase with the same eye as the door on it that Luz hadn't seen before—was bathed in yellow light as it all became suspended in midair before getting wrapped up in a blanket that should have been physically incapable of holding everything. Eda then grabbed Luz and moved her staff underneath the both of them, upon which the ornament that was once Owlbert spread its wings and lifted them both high into the air. As they flew through the air, Luz saw that the town they were just in was populated with inhabitants of varying physical appearances—some looked perfectly normal aside from the pointy ears, some looked like humanoid animals, and some looked like bizarre monsters straight out of a storybook. Not only that, but the town, itself, seemed to be built into the skeletal remains of some sort of giant, inhuman creature that was somehow housing its own vibrant ecosystem.

Suddenly, it was starting to make sense why things weren't making sense.

"So, here's my hypothesis: this isn't my world, is it?" Luz asked.

"Right you are, human. You come from the Human Realm, where everything is all sciency, and therefore boring. But right now, you're currently in the Demon Realm, specifically, the Boiling Isles, where everything is magical, therefore interesting," Eda said. "Every myth you humans have is caused by a little of our world leaking into yours. Things like griffins, vampires, giraffes—"

"Giraffes?"

"Oh, yeah. We banished those guys. Bunch of freaks."

"Huh. Guess it's a good thing we drove them to extinction, then." Eda laughed at Luz recounting the tragedy of an entire species going extinct. "Still, this place just looks insane. No one back home would believe me if I—" Luz cut herself off there. After all, even if she hadn't been exiled to potato farming, it wasn't as if any of the Laputas would take the time to listen to her about any of this. Not even her own mother.

"Yeah, I'm sure your friends will have a real laugh when you tell them about this. Of course, I can't just _let_ you go back; not for free, anyway. However, if you help me out with something, I might just—"

"I don't want to go back." The smirk Eda had been wearing the last few minutes faded away.

"What do you mean?" Eda asked.

"Exactly what I just said. Not like I have somewhere to head back to, anyway." It was a choice between remaining trapped in an utterly foreign world and going back to a familiar homestead where no one wanted her around. Either way, she'd be spending the rest of her life completely alone, so there might as well have been no choice at all.

As Luz pouted and made herself feel sad, Eda's hand found its way to her shoulder—literally, as it was apparently detachable and could move on its own. She didn't know what to make of that.

"Sorry, meant to keep that thing on me," Eda said as she reattached her hand. "It's a bit of a long flight back to my place. Feel like talking about whatever's on your mind?"

As it turned out, Luz did feel like doing that.

* * *

After an extended amount of flying, Luz and Eda's flight came to an end and they landed in the middle of a vacant forest. By that time, Luz had finished summarizing the aspects of her life that had led to her ending up on the Boiling Isles and all of its various ups and downs—it was mostly downs, unfortunately. A part of her had hoped that unloading it all on someone would make her feel better, but it only had a minimal effect on her mood.

"Well, Luz—it is Luz, right?" Eda asked. Luz nodded her head. "Well, Luz, I must say, that's quite the sad life you've got going for you."

"Don't have to tell me twice. It's _my_ life, after all," Luz said.

"Still, the nerve of those people treating you like that! Trying to exile you to potato farming just because you're clumsy, accident-prone, always ruin things for everyone, never build anything that doesn't blow up in everyone's face, inconvenience other people's lives in your failed attempts at bettering yourself—"

"When do we get to the part where you make me feel better?" Luz cut in.

"I'm getting to that! The point is I get it. I've had people giving me a hard time for trying to stand out my whole life, and now I'm the most wanted person on the Boiling Isles just for—mostly—not wanting to play by these people's stupid rules. But I don't let it bother me because I know they can't do anything to stop me from being who I am."

"That's not the same for me, though. You're the Owl Lady. When you act true to yourself, you get to fight monsters and beat up guards and bend the laws of physics to an absurd degree. When I try and be myself, all I do is hurt the only people I've ever known, and if not them, then just myself." Luz looked down at her prosthetic for an instant. "I know I shouldn't mess things up for everyone else, but no one ever gives me a chance to get better; all they do is yell at me and tell me to knock it off, but I can't! Inventing and tinkering are what I was born to do, but they've never even given me a real chance to do it, and that's so unfair! I know that if they just let me work things out, I could make things that would always help them out, no matter what!"

"So you're only inventing things to make other people happy, then? Not yourself?" Luz elected not to answer that. "If you ask me, the only thing that'll make your pirate pals happy is more pirating, so if you want them to respect you, you just need to get better at that."

"Really? How do I do that? Are there any blimps I can rob around here?"

"No, but I do have a bit of thievery and skullduggery you can join me on if you're up for it." Thinking back, Luz remembered that Eda was making her some sort of offer before she got into the story of her life, so this was most likely that. The offer was originally meant to be something she'd do in exchange for going home, so even if that was off the table, it still had to be some kind of trick.

"Yeah, let's do it." Even if it was a trick, Eda had a point about how getting better at stealing things might help make the Laputas respect her, so even if it was a trick, she didn't lose anything by going along with it.

"You've made a wise decision here, Luz. Follow me back to my place where I'll explain everything."

"Can't you just tell me everything while we're walking? Or, you know, right now?"

"I could, but I don't want to."

With that, Eda led Luz through the woods in unnecessary silence until they arrived at a large white house with blue roofing and a stained glass window in the shape of the same eye on the door Eda was in control of. Behind the house was a crumbling stone tower, and the sight of it and its sorry state made Luz wonder if parts of it could be broken for useful materials. That question could be answered another day, of course.

"Your place is kind of exposed, you know. Aren't you worried about getting discovered."

"That'll never happen. Not when I've got a state‐of‐the‐art defense system."

"Hoot-hoot! What's the password?" The one who said that was the owl-shaped fixture on the front door, having magically—Luz still needed to adjust to that—stretched out to get between the two of them. Luz didn't know what she expected, but it wasn't that.

"Not now, Hooty. Just let us in," Eda said.

"Aw, you never want to have any fun! Hoot!" Hooty receded back into the door and it swung open without any prompting. The two stepped inside and Eda snapped her fingers, causing a series of candles to spontaneously light up and show a room littered with what had to be a variety of magical artifacts.

"This is the Owl House. What do you think?"

"I think those candles are basically the same as my lightbulbs, but less practical."

"Again, I have no idea what that's supposed to be." Luz ignored that as she put her glider and toolbox down and walked around the room, taking note of the weapons and chests and books and other such things strewn about. She didn't understand anything that she was looking at, but she was sure it was interesting in its own right.

"Eda, you bought the wrong bubble soap! I specifically asked for lavender breeze, and I clearly smell like magenta gust! What am I supposed to do with that?" Into the room stepped some sort of talking bipedal animal with an exposed horned skull and a duck-print bath towel wrapped around his waist. Luz thought he was just adorable to look at, but he got less adorable when he screamed at the sight of her. "Eda, look out! We've been invaded by some sort of tiny automaton wearing the skin of one of its victims!" The animal threw a rubber duck at Luz's face, and she felt largely unamused by that.

"Calm down, King. She's just a human kid I picked up in the market," Eda said.

"Oh, yeah? Then how do you explain her automaton-y flesh right there?"

"This is more or less the answer to that," Luz said, pulling off her arm for a few seconds before reattaching it.

"Oh, so it's a battle scar, then. I, too, have been greatly wounded in fierce combat," King said, pointing to the chipped horn on his head. "Very well then, I accept that you are not up to no good. For now, anyway."

"Aw, you are just a precious little thing, you know that?" Luz asked before scooping King up and bringing him into a hug he repeatedly failed to get out of.

"Stop it! This is not how the King of Demons deserves to be treated! If I had my full power, I would destroy you right here and now!"

"Good thing you don't have it, then. Also, what?"

"Now it's explanation time," Eda said, pulling King out of Luz's grip and placing him back on the ground. "You see, Luz, King was once a powerful demon lord until the day his crown was stolen and he was drained of all his power."

"And he'll just get it back the second he puts it back on? So it works like a battery or a generator or something?"

"It's not like that at all! You humans, always trying to answer things with that dumb-dumb science stuff of yours," King said.

"Again, science is literally the exact opposite of dumb. How else do you think all the mysteries of the universe are answered?"

"Magic, probably," Eda said.

"Exactly! Science is good for absolutely nothing!" King said.

"Untrue! I mean, do you think magic could have invented penicillin?" Luz asked.

"I have never heard of that before now, but the answer is yes, so I'm still right. Besides, can your _science_ explain why it rains?"

"Yes! Yes, it can!"

"Okay, we're getting off track here. Both of you have a muffin and calm down," Eda said. A pair of muffins flew out of Eda's refrigerator and into Luz and King's hands. In all honesty, eating the muffin did help her calm down. "Where was I? Oh, right, the crown. The crown is currently being held by Warden Wrath at the Conformatorium along with other contraband behind a barrier that blocks out everything with even the smallest amount of magical power. That's where you come in with all your non-magical juices and junk."

"Please don't say 'juices'." Eda simply shrugged her shoulders. "So you need me to get past the barrier because I'm conveniently the only person physically capable of doing so, then? Yeah, I think a sky pirate like myself can handle that."

"Yes! Soon the world shall once again know to fear the wrath that is King!" King said before stepping on his rubber duck and making it let out a squeak.

The things she did for self-improvement.

* * *

The Conformatorium was about a dreary a place that Luz could imagine a place with that name would look like. It was a massive stone tower surrounded by an ominous stone structure and rows upon rows of giant teeth sticking out of rotting gums. Luz understood that these people decided to establish a society in the rotting carcass of a giant monster for some reason, but that didn't mean they had to lean into the idea of making everything look terrifying. The out of nowhere clap of thunder certainly didn't do it or Luz's nerves any favors, and she would have let herself fall over if it wouldn't have compromised her makeshift rucksack of various items.

"You sure are popular for the wrong reasons, Eda," Luz said, taking note of a wanted poster for her listing a one trillion Snail bounty.

"No one ever said being the most powerful witch around was easy, Luz," Eda said.

"Yeah, but it sure would be great if it was," King said. "Okay, Luz, Eda's going to take out the guards while you and I sneak into the top of the tower. Simple enough, right?"

"Please. Like this is the first tower I've ever had to break into."

"Nice. Hopefully, that experience will come in handy." Previous attempts at breaking into towers ended in her triggering booby traps that left her mother and other members of the Laputas trapped in dungeons, but it was best to keep that to herself. "You want me to just lift you up there or do you want to use that weird doodad of yours."

"I will use my _gadget_ , thank you. Gotta show you both what this thing can do," Luz said, pulling her folded up glider out from under her armpit.

"Wait, what? What is she saying?" King asked. Luz placed King on top of her head as a circle of light appeared underneath her feet, no doubt because of Eda. Suddenly, the earth shot up underneath her and launched her and King high into the air. As King screamed, Luz unfolded and stepped onto her glider and activated the propellers, putting their freefall to a quick end.

"Oh yeah. This is so much easier with two hands," Luz said while turning her glider up and flying towards the top of the tower. She saw Eda flying off in a different direction on her staff while giving her a thumbs up. It was very strange having someone flash a finger her way in a positive manner, so Luz was going to do her best not to jinx it.

"Is this how all you humans get around in your world? Because it seems needlessly complicated," King said.

"It's mostly a pirate thing, so what you call complicated, I call exciting," Luz said.

"This sounds like another science thing. If it is, it just proves my point about science being dumb."

"That was never a point with an ounce of validity to it."

"Says you, nerd!"

"You're lucky you're cute, you know that?" King stuck his tongue out at Luz. Luz ignored that as they made their way to the top of the tower and flew in through a window. The two landed in the middle of a panopticon that looked as dreary and depressing as one might think a panopticon would look. "Magic prison doesn't look that different from human prison. Wonder what these people are in here for."

"The crime of free expression, that's what," said a dark-skinned woman inside one of the cages. "You should know that, though. How'd you get out of your cage?"

"I'm actually breaking _in_ , not out. Now when you say you're in here for free expression, what do you mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like. I'm locked up for writing fanfics about food falling in love with other food." Luz didn't know what that was supposed to mean.

"I like to eat my own eyes," said a multi-eyed monster man.

"The world is a simulation! We are nothing but pawns in a grand design!" said a tiny creature with a giant nose.

"She's a conspiracy nut, if you didn't get that," the fanfic lady said.

"I got it, but still, how is it fair that any of you are in here?" Luz asked. "All you're guilty of is not doing what everyone else is doing. Why does writing stuff about food or engaging in self-mutilation or just being an overall weirdo mean that you have to be cut off from the rest of the world? You're just trying to be who you are, and that's no reason for you to be exiled to potato farming!"

"What?"

"I mean put in jail! Yeah, that's what I meant, so let's put an end to that!" Luz threw her rucksack down and fished threw it until she found exactly what she was looking for: pieces of string and three sticks of dynamite.

"Luz, come on, we don't have time for you to project your own fragile insecurities onto these people!" King said.

"Says you! I'll project all night if I have to!" A part of Luz knew that nothing about that was healthy, but another part of her, the part that was still angry about everything that had transpired over the last twenty-four hours, truly didn't care, and it was that part of her that made her light the fuses of the dynamite and pull King back as they exploded and destroyed the bars of the prisoners' cells.

"She knows how to manipulate the bonds of reality to her whim!" the tiny creature said.

"Nope, but even someone like me knows how to light a little TNT. Now run and be free! Go out and express yourselves, but maybe with a little bit of moderation because some of the stuff you're saying and doing is legitimately weird. I mean, not weird enough that you deserve to be in jail for it, but—I'm ruining it, just go!" The prisoners cheered as they ran off while thanking Luz and spouting more of their inane nonsense. Either way, she couldn't help feeling good about yourself.

"Did you blow up their cells with science, Luz? Why didn't you tell me science could be used to destroy things?! Now I _love_ science!" King said.

"That's not—Ah, forget it. Let's just keep going." Luz stuffed her glider into her rucksack, threw the rucksack back onto her back, and took three steps forward before a giant, fleshy knife landed in front of her and almost cut off her nose.

"You're pretty bold, human." Luz watched the knife recede away as it turned into the arm of a large man in white wearing a plague doctor's mask. "Here I thought your otherworldly rampage started and ended with destroying that cabbage merchant's livelihood, but now I find you breaking into _my_ prison? Freeing _my_ prisoners?"

"I take it you're the warden, then." Luz picked up her revolver and started turning the key.

"That's right, and you had no right to mess with my prisoners."

"Well, _you_ had no right to lock them up like animals. Even if someone causes trouble from doing something you don't like, you should help them find a way to make it work, not throw them away so no one has to look at them anymore!"

"You clearly don't know how things work around here." Warden Wrath's arms transformed into axes.

"Maybe I don't know how you do things here, but this is how we do things back there!" Luz finished turning her key and fired an explosive round at Warden Wrath. He swung his axe hands to intercept, but Luz was quicker to the draw and managed to land a clean hit on him. Unfortunately, all it managed to do was singe his clothes a bit and destroy his mask to expose his face.

A face with tiny eyes and a toothy mouth that was breathing fire.

"New plan: let's run away!"

"I would very much enjoy that plan!" King said. The two of them took off from the scene as Warden Wrath gave them chase, slicing up their surroundings with every step he took. "I can't believe you couldn't blow him up with that weird thingy on your waist!"

"It's called a gun!" Luz said while narrowly ducking away from an axe swipe.

"Whatever it is, it's stupid! And to think you actually had me finding value in science for a hot second back there. No more of that! From now on, I will return to living in blissful ignorance until the day I die!"

"That is a terrible life plan!"

"Says you!" The two of them fled down the only hallway leading out of the panopticon. Warden Wrath caught up to them with relative ease, but before he could keep going, a wall of ice appeared out of thin air, closing off the hallway with him on the other side.

"Someone care to tell me what's going on here?" Eda asked, floating down from the ceiling of the hallway.

"Luz picked a fight with the warden and now I have conflicting feelings about the usefulness of science!" King said.

"Really? I leave you alone for a few minutes, and _this_ is what happens?"

"I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry!" Luz cried. "All those people being locked up just for being different reminded me of me and I didn't want to just let it be, so I just did whatever I wanted and messed things up for everyone, just like I always do! The only thing different is that I actually went out of my way to cause trouble, but that just makes things worse, and I'm sorry for that, too!"

"Okay, okay, you're sorry, let's just move on, already," Eda said with a roll of the eye that made Luz take pause.

"Just like that? You're not gonna yell at me or talk about how disappointed you are in me for screwing up?"

"Wasn't planning on it. I mean, it's not like I'm not annoyed with you, but you were just trying to do things the only way you know how, so how can I yell at you for that? Besides, I'd have to be an idiot to think we could have gotten out of here without one of us messing things up, somehow. So yeah, you messed up, but how you plan on fixing things is more important than making sure you get the riot act, don't you think?"

An adult authority figure was taking one of Luz's mistakes in stride and not acting like she was more trouble than she was worth because of it. Luz had always dreamed of that happening, but the reality of it felt far greater than anything she could have hoped to imagine. The moment was slightly tarnished when Luz, upon moving to wipe her tears, accidentally hit herself in the face with her claw hand, but it still felt good, nonetheless.

"Hey, I know we're having a heartwarming moment here, but the warden's melting the ice," King said, directing Luz and Eda's attention to exactly that.

"Oh yeah. We should probably get the crown and get out of here," Eda said. Eda pulled Luz and King onto her staff and flew off down the hall at the exact second that Warden Wrath broke through the wall of ice; Eda was able to quickly create a lot of distance between them, but that didn't mean they could take their time. As such, Luz wasn't surprised when, upon arriving at a door labeled "Contraband", Eda blasted it open with a laser so they could immediately fly through the hole that was created. Eda brought their flight to a halt just as Luz laid her eyes on the glowing pillar of light in the center of the room.

"The crown's behind that barrier, Luz. Grab it so we can get out of here," Eda said.

"On it!" Luz jumped off the staff and ran through the barrier, a tingling sensation washing over her as she did. Inside the barrier was a mountain of gothic items that wouldn't be out of place in a horror radio serial. Luz looked around the pile and only found one thing that even resembled a crown. It probably wasn't right, something like that couldn't possibly be right, but they were pressed for time, so Luz grabbed the paper crown and ran out of the barrier hoping that its flimsy appearance was just another quirk of magic.

"You got it! Yay!" King said. He happily placed the crown on top of his head just as Warden Wrath burst into the room with a stream of fire shooting out of his mouth. "Okay, Warden Jerkface, prepare to feel the ultimate wrath of—Ah, my spleen!" King said the last part because Warden Wrath extended his arm and slapped him against the barrier.

"That crown doesn't do anything, does it?" Luz asked.

"No," Eda said.

"And King was never an all-powerful demon lord, was he?"

"Also no." It appeared that they were all going to die in a convoluted plan to boost King's morale. It all felt very fitting, somehow.

"You've annoyed me enough for one day, human," Warden Wrath said. "I knew that indulging you would draw out the Owl Lady, but even this has started to feel like too much." More fire shot out of his mouth. Luz started feeling scared, so she did what she often did when she felt scared: drop her stuff and start building with whatever random junk she had on hand.

"You did all this for little ol' me? I'd feel flattered if I knew anything about you."

"Oh, but I know everything about you. You're a daredevil of a woman who plays with the demonic arts with reckless abandon and causes chaos whenever and however she pleases. That's the kind of woman you are, and it's exactly why I think we would make a great couple." Luz paused her tinkering for a second to fight back the urge to vomit.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Years of failing to capture you made me realize that I have a thing for gals who like to live on the edge, and no one does that better than you. What do you say to becoming the most powerful power couple in all the Boiling Isles?"

"Give me a second." Eda drew a circle and fired a laser into Warden Wrath that knocked him flat on his back. "That work as an answer?" Warden Wrath shot back up and shot fire at Eda that was blocked by a wall of light. "Feel like it's irrelevant at this point."

"My spleen is temporarily irreparably damaged, so I can't do anything. How do we get out of here?" King asked while rubbing his forearm; Luz had a feeling he didn't even know what a spleen was.

"With this!" Luz jumped up, her stress tinkering having ended in the completion of a device that would undoubtedly save the day.

"A toy?" Eda's questioning wasn't unwarranted. With nothing but gears, springs, screws, a rock, and assorted pieces of metal Luz had on hand, Luz had constructed a tiny lever-operated mechanism that would slam a rock against whatever was trapped inside the mechanism.

"Naturally, the size of it doesn't make it good for anything that big, but that can be—Is there a spell that makes things bigger?" Eda nodded her head. "Yeah, that can be changed. I need you to make this thing grow enough so that the lever is five meters in length and a one-meter distance between the joint and the fulcrum."

"Not gonna lie, I only understood the first half of that."

"Stupid dumb science!" King said. Luz let out a groan, and at the same time, Warden Wrath's fire broke through Eda's defense and forced them all to jump apart for safety.

"Just make it grow until I tell you to stop!" Luz said before sliding the mechanism in front of Eda's feet. While a circle of light encompassed the mechanism, Luz pulled out her revolver once more and turned her key until she was able to fire off another explosive round at Warden Wrath, though just like the previous one, it was hardly effective.

"Your human tools are laughably pitiful. Though I suppose a tool is only as competent as the one who wields it," Warden Wrath said with a laugh.

"Take that back! No one gets to mock Luz for incompetence but us, you hear me?!" King shouted, his words encouraging in their own way, somehow.

"All I hear is a dead demon walking."

"We didn't come all this way just for you to—Eda, that's good, stop!" Luz's shouting got Eda to stop her growth spell, her mechanism now the perfect size for the plan she had concocted.

"Thank God, because I'm honestly feeling a little winded," Eda said.

"Now all we have to do is—"

"You will do nothing!" Warden Wrath's arms turned into tentacles that shot out ensnared Eda and King and lifted them into the air; he nearly got Luz as well, but she was fortunate enough to duck at the right moment and avoid capture.

"Oh, no." Her prosthetic arm wasn't so fortunate.

"Oh, yes. Now I will squeeze the life out of your companions, humans, and without this stupid fake limb of yours, all you can do is watch like the helpless whelp you are. I ought to destroy it, as well, just to further sell the idea of your own failure."

"No, you can't!" It was meant to just be a desperate cry for mercy, but the second the words left Luz's lips, an all-or-nothing gamble of an idea entered her head. "You can't destroy my arm because then you won't be able to make Eda your girlfriend!"

"What?" Warden Wrath asked after a moment of hesitation.

"You heard me. That arm is actually the silver hand of Airgetlam, only it's brown because it rusted from age. It's one of the only magical relics in the entire Human Realm, and it has the power to make you completely irresistible to the opposite sex."

" _Really_? How intriguing."

"How are you buying this—" King was cut off by Luz throwing a stuffed rabbit at King that had fallen out of the barrier when she was getting his crown.

"Yes, very intriguing! If you use it, you can make Eda fall in love with you in an instant, but that won't happen if you destroy it, and I'm also the only one who knows how to activate the spell." Warden Wrath stared Luz down with his tiny eyes; she wasn't sure if he was doubting her, deciding if she would make a good meal, or some combination of the two.

"New plan, human: you will use this spell of yours to help me become the Owl Lady's boyfriend, and rather than kill you, I will simply allow you the privilege of rotting in a cell for the rest of your days. How does that sound?"

"Like the lesser of two evils, I guess." Luz did what she could to hold back a smile. "Okay, the first thing you've got to do is point the palm at your face." A smaller tentacle extended out of the larger mass with Luz's arm wrapped around it and pointed the palm towards his face. "Too far! It's got to be right up in your face for the spell to do anything." Warden Wrath moved the arm as instructed.

"Is this good enough?"

"Perfect. Also, anyone who _should not_ be affected by what's about to happen should _cover their eyes_." Eda closed her eyes tight, and once King got the message, he did the same. "Are you ready?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Are you absolutely, positively—"

"Hurry up and activate the spell before I change my mind, human!"

"Okay, okay. Here it is." Luz pulled her goggles down over her eyes and shouted, "Flashbang!" At the sound of her voice, a flash of light shot out of the palm of her artificial hand right in Warden Wrath's face. Warden Wrath screamed as he was hit point blank with blinding light and, just as Luz hoped, dropped everything in his tentacles as he covered his eyes.

"Nice plan, kid. Almost wish I came up with it," Eda said as she landed on her feet and King landed flat on his face.

"Now we just have to get him into my machine. I think violence is the best answer for this." Luz fastened her arm back into place, and as Warden Wrath continued to reel in pain, Luz punched him with her prosthetic, and Eda hit him with her staff, the combined force and precision of the assault sending him flying into the mechanism. Without being asked, Eda cast a spell to tighten the screws on the side of the mechanism to lock Warden Wrath in place.

"You think this will hold me, human?! The second I regain my sight, I will—"

"It's not for holding, it's for _winning_ —" Luz cut in. "Thanks to Eda's magic, this device of mine has grown to a size that has the lever being five meters long and the joint and the fulcrum being one meter apart from each other. Why is this important, you ask? Well, this device operates on the principle of leverage, which is what happens when you use a lever to amplify an input force to provide a greater output force, so—"

"Luz, I know you're on a roll here, but we don't have all night," Eda interjected.

"Fine. Basically, we pull the lever and the rock will hit him really hard."

"Lead with that, next time!" King said, jumping on top of the lever and pulling it down to a complete stop. Just as Luz had tried to say, the rock attached to the lever fell down with tremendous speed and force, all of which came crashing down into Warden Wrath's midsection.

Luz didn't have the exact math in her head for how strong it was, but considering that Warden Wrath stopped struggling against his bonds and slipped into unconsciousness, it had to be plenty strong.

"I-I won? I got a completely undeniable victory?" Luz asked.

"Certainly looks that way," Eda said.

"And it was so violent! I love science again!" King said, hugging Luz's leg.

"I did it. I invented something, and it worked the way I wanted it to work. I invented something, and it didn't just make things worse for everyone. I invented something, and it didn't blow up—"

Luz's mechanism then exploded and left a still unconscious Warden Wrath on fire.

"Okay, but it didn't blow up in any of our faces, so this still counts as a win."

"A man is on fire, Luz. Why would anyone _not_ be happy about this?" King asked.

"Now it really is time to leave," Eda said. She blasted a hole in the wall, plopped everyone onto her staff, and flew them outside into the open night air.

* * *

"The stars are a lot prettier here than they are in my world," Luz said as Eda flew the three of them back to the Owl House. "Maybe it's because there isn't as much air pollution, or maybe it's because I'm just too used to the ones in my world, but it's nice."

"Huh. Never really thought about it that much," Eda said.

"Yeah, I guess those giant fireflies in the sky _are_ pretty nice to look at," King said. Luz didn't know if that's what stars were in that world or if King just didn't know what stars were made of, and she was feeling too tired to ask about it.

"I wasn't kidding about what I said back there. This was the first time any of my inventing or tinkering actually went the way I wanted it to, and as crazy as it might sound, I can't help but feel like it was because magic was involved."

"Doesn't sound too crazy to me, what with how incredible magic is," Eda said.

"Do you think you could teach me how to use it?"

"You want to learn magic? You, little miss science girl?"

"Yes, I do! I don't know why, but I think it's the missing element for making my inventions work the way I want them to work!" As illogical as that might have been, Luz could only feel logic radiating from her words. "Earlier today, you asked me if I wanted to invent things to make other people happy or just myself, but I think it's both. I want my mom and Captain Hal and all the other Laputas to look at the things I can do with pride, but at the same time, I want to feel like I can make something I'm actually satisfied with. At the end of the day, I want to use my science to make everyone happy, but I don't think my science will be complete without magic, so please teach me anything you can!" Eda let out a small hum as they kept flying through the air.

"Well, I _could_ use an extra hand around the house, plus all of that science mumbo jumbo could be useful for turning a profit. Yeah, why not? You got a deal, kid." Luz let out a stream of thanks while King jumped onto Luz and cheered about how she could blow up all of his enemies for him. The three of them nearly fell over from all of that, but Luz was too happy to be bothered by it.

As it turned out, being banished to potato farming was the best thing she could have asked for.


	3. To Lend a Hand

Luz awoke at her usual wakeup time with a smile, something that, just yesterday, she thought she'd never be able to do again. If everything had gone the way it was supposed to, the only thing she would have had to look forward to was hours upon hours of potato farming and unwarranted political debates. However, that wasn't what was happening. Instead, she had ended up in a parallel universe that ran on magic, of all things, and she had decided to make that world her new home in the hope that combining magic with science was what she needed to make her inventions work. She still didn't have much of an idea of how that would work, but it was a good thing that she wasn't trying to go at it alone.

"Oh, you're still here?" Those were the first words said to her by Eda, the sleepwear-clad witch who Luz thought had agreed to teach her about magic.

"You invited me to live here, remember?" Luz asked. Eda shrugged her shoulders and Luz felt a wave of uncertainty wash over her.

"Look, I'm tired, give me a break. How are you so perky at this hour, anyway?" Eda asked, pouring herself a drink from the fridge.

"I'm used to it. Helps that I've spent the last few hours planning out ways to combine magic and science into one. The thing we did with the size alteration definitely has to happen again, but I'm also thinking it'd be cool to find a way to incorporate the levitation powers of your staff into my glider to increase efficiency, and maybe I could even use it to build a plane even better than the ones we use back home. I also think—"

"Before I even begin to decipher some of those words, did you say you've been up for _hours_?" Eda asked.

"Yeah. Woke up at four in the morning, just like I always do." Eda nearly spat out her drink that Luz wanted to say was apple juice, but she couldn't be too sure.

"Oh my God, why?"

"I've been trained to always get up that early. You never know when you'll have to suddenly rob a treasury blimp that suddenly entered your air path or get into a biplane to escape a rival crew of sky pirates trying to get the drop on you."

"Yeah, well, those things aren't going to happen here, so knock it off. Anything that goes out of its way to get up before seven is unnatural."

"I agree, especially when there's spillover!" King said, curled up on the couch and facing away from them, a stuffed rabbit clutched between his paws.

"I woke up King when I woke up," Luz said.

"And now I can't get back to sleep. I need my beauty rest to maintain solid levels of ferocity, you know." King's stuffed rabbit let out a small squeak as he squeezed it.

"Is he always so cute when he's tired?" Luz asked.

"Maybe. I'm probably too tired to ever notice," Eda said.

"So back to my ideas of what I can do with magic. You had that earth spell you used to launch King and me into the air, so I was thinking that maybe I could work that into a catapult or a trebuchet. A catapult would probably be easier, but a trebuchet has superior launching power, so maybe we go with that? Either way, maybe that kind of magic could be used to increase the launching speed or to fortify the base or—"

"Luz, you need to learn how to slow down." Luz took the hint and stopped talking. "It's great that you're eager to learn magic, but you need to start with the basics before you can even think about doing any weird stuff like that."

"Basics. Right. I'm guessing that involves getting my own wand?"

"Oh, you dumb, naive little child." Eda laughed as she said that, and that was a good indication to Luz that she was wrong. "A witch only earns their wand after completing their training. Normally, that'd happen after you graduate from school, but since you're with me, you'll have to earn it in a different way."

"So I'm not learning magic, then?"

"You are, just after you prove your worth with some manual labor. In addition to Human Realm oddities Owlbert picks up here and there, I also sell potions and elixirs to people in town, and starting today, you're going to be helping me with that." Eda picked a bag of assorted beakers and bottles filled with liquids and handed them to Luz, so she assumed that they were the previously mentioned potions and elixirs. "Most of this is prepaid deliveries you gotta make, but the rest is new product I want you to try and sell to whoever will buy it."

"Are you sure about this? I'm better at taking things from people than I am at giving things to them, and I'm not even that good at taking things."

"You'll get used to it. You kind of have to if you want to stay here, after all." Luz didn't know if Eda was implying that she'd send her back home or if she'd just throw her out onto the street, but the thought of either one put a frown on her face. "Okay, I guess I should try and help you not look like a _completely_ dead fish out there with a little bit of sage wisdom: presentation."

"'Presentation'? What do you mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like. Whenever I go out to try and sell stuff, I always try and put on a bit of a show and throw in a little razzle-dazzle. You know, make it look like I'm having the time of my life so I can trick these yahoos into thinking they'll have the time of their lives if they buy it. I use my magic to help with that, so maybe you can use all your science stuff to make it work. That make sense?" Luz let it ruminate in her head for a bit before nodding her head and coming to the conclusion that it did, indeed, make sense.

"What can I make, though? I didn't bring a lot of stuff with me because I thought I'd be able to get stuff with the land division."

"Hey, you're the scientist here, so don't ask me. Just root around the junk pile until you find something useful."

"Right, might be something useful in the junk pile. Also, what junk pile?"

"Oh, right, you were asleep for that part." Eda took a long sip from her mug, the only added elaboration she gave being her pointing to the door. It was clear that she wasn't going to get anything else out of her, so Luz stepped outside to see what was supposed to be there.

In retrospect, there was very little room for interpretation with what constituted a junk pile, so of course, there was a large pile of random objects thrown in front of the Owl House. Luz initially didn't feel like getting excited about something like that, but after looking at it for a few seconds and remembering that there wasn't anything like that yesterday, she quickly gained a reason to feel excited.

"This is all stuff from Earth!" In her excitement, Luz almost dived right into the junk pile, but she managed to control herself enough to simply run up to it and start rooting around through it. "There's welding torches, which is great, because I only brought two with me, so—Oh, size seventeen gears! I can't believe I didn't think to bring any gears that big with me. How did I even plan on—Yes, more bullets! I was worried I'd have to start making my own, which wouldn't be too hard, so long as I could get my hands on some sulfur and saltpeter and bat guano and—No way, steel cables! So much better than regular old rope! Ah! _Ay que fabulosa_!" At that point, Luz did allow herself to fall into the junk pile.

"I'm guessing you can use some of this stuff for something," Eda said from the doorway.

"Try me being able to use _everything_! Wait, are you so tired because you were up all night getting me this stuff?"

"Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. Either way, don't say I never did anything nice for you. Now hurry up and science up something that'll empty pockets."

"Can do!" Luz said with a salute; she remembered not to do it with her prosthetic and bang her head, so it was an especially good salute. "I've already got so many great ideas, but I bet I can get a dozen more if you just give me a minute." Luz went back to digging through the junk pile without even waiting for Eda's response, only to stop herself when she grabbed onto something hairy with what felt like a small layer of slime. Intellectual curiosity just barely edged out disgust, so Luz pushed some of the pile away to see what she was grabbing at.

"Hiya, Luz!" It was Hooty. She didn't know how she missed him being stretched out from the door, but there he was as whatever he was. "Man, this is the best ball pit I've ever been in, and it's only a little dirtier than a normal one, hoot!"

"What's a ball pit, and how would even go anywhere when you're attached to the house? Also, why are you slimy?"

"Oh yeah, that reminds me, another thing you're going to have to do here is clean Hooty every now and then. It's even more unpleasant than it sounds," Eda said while Hooty kept rolling around in the junk pile.

"I'm a dirty boy, and I love it! Hey, what's this? Looks like fun!" Hooty said, his body coiled around a metal canister that Luz immediately recognized and immediately started trying to pry away from him. "Hey, knock it off! Me and my new friend are having fun!"

"That is not your friend, Hooty, it's a canister of nitroglycerin! If you mess around with it, it might explode!"

"Listen to her, Hooty! Give us all a minute to move a safe distance away, and _then_ you can blow yourself up!" Eda said.

"No, that should not be the takeaway from all of this! Seriously, Hooty, you do not want to risk an explosion!"

"You don't know what I want! I'm my own man, hoot hoot!" In an absurd act of defiance, Hooty started squeezing the canister of nitroglycerin harder than before.

Luz didn't know what he was supposed to be, but he was certainly something else.

* * *

Fortunately for everyone involved, Luz managed to pull the nitroglycerin away from Hooty before anything and get Eda to put it somewhere she was assured he wouldn't be able to get to, and she could finally relax again; the last thing Luz needed was to die in a fiery explosion that she wasn't responsible for. After that was taken care of, Luz got to work on what she thought would be the best invention for what she was doing that could be completed in the quickest amount of time, and an hour later, Luz was gliding into town—Bonesborough, if she was remembering the name right—with her invention and her wears at the ready.

"Ugh, there's too many people down there. We need a new plague." And also King, who Eda assured her would be able to do a good job of keeping some of the more monstrous townsfolk from trying to eat her, even in his groggy state.

"Eh, they're not as good at killing people as you think they'd be," Luz said. King tried to press her for more information, but she ignored him. She needed to focus on the job, her first job, her first chance to prove to Eda that she could be useful to her on a regular basis and had a place in her world.

_No pressure, or anything_ , Luz thought. _And we're landing, we're landing, we're landing._ As indicated by Luz's thoughts, she took the glider into a descent and gracefully landed on the side of a street. Luz didn't get a good look at Bonesborough when she and Eda were running away from the cabbage merchant the previous day, but now that she had a chance to look around, she could see that there was an old-timey, medieval theme going on with the architecture of the town. The whole thing would have been quaint, if not for the giant bones and random assortment of monstrous structures thrown about.

"Okay, we'll start with trying to sell some stuff so I can get a feel for it, and then we'll move on to the deliveries. Sound good?" Luz asked.

"I want to punch everyone in the face to make them stop talking," King said.

"Close enough." Luz set her toolbox down, untied Eda's bag from around her waist, and pulled her invention off of her back. "Whoa, feeling pretty light now. Great! King, you mind propping up the table for me?"

"What table?" Luz stared at King for a few seconds before the weight of his words fully sunk in, along with all of their implications.

"I forgot to bring a table. Oh my God, I forgot to bring a table!" Luz smacked herself in the head, the act hurting even more because she accidentally used her prosthetic arm. "I can't believe I did that! I need to prop up my device on something so I have enough space to actually use it! Stupid, stupid, stupid—Okay, calm down. Just gotta head back to the Owl House and get a table. I'm sure Eda will only be mildly frustrated that I'm taking even more time out of her day, so with any luck, I won't have to deal with that for too long." With that decision in mind, Luz grabbed her folded-up glider and started climbing a nearby building to gain proper altitude.

Luz did not get too far because the apparently sentient house threw her off because she was scratching him too hard.

"You gotta be careful about scratching houses, Luz," King said, his body lazily draped over Luz's invention.

"Duly noted." Luz was about to start looking for a house that wasn't alive for her to climb up when she noticed that she had started to draw in a crowd. Passersby both humanoid and monstrous had started gathering around her and King, some being surprised by the sight of a human, some wondering how human flesh tasted, and others laughing at her for not being able to tell the difference between a sentient house and a non-sentient house; for some reason, it sounded like that was the largest topic of discussion. "Okay, wow, I was not prepared for this."

"You weren't prepared for literally the thing we came here to do?"

"I was, I thought I was, but it's not on my own terms, you know? I was going to make some sort of big speech to get people here, but they're all staring at me because I'm looking like an idiot. It's like I never even left home." Luz, on pure instinct, opened up her toolbox and started messing around with random pieces of junk while everyone kept looking at her. "I didn't plan on this. I didn't think things would go this way, yet here we are. Even in the scenarios I came up with where everything went wrong, I never even thought about it happening straight out of the gate!"

"Calm down, you're giving me an even bigger headache." Luz ignored King as she kept messing around with her tinkering and people started using floating scrolls to make bizarre flashing and camera-like sounds. "Okay, whenever Eda and I are in trouble, we just cut and run. You don't have magic for that, so I'm just gonna throw one of those explodey things you used in the Conformatorium into the crowd so we have a chance to escape."

"I don't have any more dynamite. I mean, I brought smoke bombs with me, because I'd be stupid not to do that, but don't throw one here."

"I'm gonna throw one."

"Please don't throw one." Luz wasn't looking directly at King, but she could tell that he was walking over to her toolbox to grab a smoke bomb. Normally, she would have moved to stop him, but doing so would have required going away from her stress relief tinkering, and that wasn't something she could bring herself to do. As it stood, it was hard for Luz to imagine anything about the day going well for her.

"Hey, come on, she _just_ said not to touch her stuff. You can't do what you want just because you're adorable."

"I can do whatever I want, regardless of any misattributed cuteness! Now, why don't you just—Hey, stop it!" Based on his tone of voice, Luz concluded that King was objecting to being picked up and held, just like he did when she did that yesterday. That was enough to get Luz to look up from her stress relief tinkering, and when she did, she saw that King was being embraced by a stocky young girl who wore a shirt with a highly stylized comic book character of some sort on the front and had a fishhook sticking out of her right ear and a spiked hairband keeping her brown hair in a messy bun.

"Hey, is this okay? Probably should have asked before I went and did it, but he's just so fluffy that I couldn't resist!" the girl said.

"I am _not_ fluffy! Now put me down before I—"

"But the best part is the horns. I can tell just by looking at them that they're really well taken care of, even the chipped one. Bet there's a good story there."

"You have a great eye for detail, super clingy girl." King appeared to be pacified, so Luz took the chance to ask the girl for her name.

"My name's Viney. You're a human, right? That's pretty cool."

"Um, thanks! I'm Luz, by the way. Luz Noceda, semi-retired sky pirate, totally hardened criminal, girl who divulges more of her personal bio than is necessary and can be stopped at any time."

"I'm tempted to see how far this can go, but you can go ahead and stop now," Viney said. The girl wasn't mocking Luz for her poor social skills, so that seemed to be a good start to things. "So, it looks like you're trying to do some kind of human thing over here. Do you need any help?"

"I'm not really doing a human thing here—" The rest of Viney's sentence finished processing through Luz's head. Thinking about it, Viney, as short as she was, was about as tall as the decent-sized table that she somehow forgot to bring with her, and her offering to help at all meant that there was at least the possibility that she wouldn't laugh at her for asking for it. "Yes, I do need help! If you don't mind, can you just lift that big thing right there off the ground?"

"Yeah, sure." Viney put down King, who looked like he was just about to fall asleep before Viney jostled him, and picked up Luz's invention, a large, metallic box holding a metal canister with cables feeding into the canister and a nozzle sticking out of the front end. Luz wanted to take a second to be impressed with how effortlessly Viney lifted it up, but she needed to make an attempt to take advantage of the crowd.

"Ladies, gentlemen, demons and other monsters of varying size—Wait, is monster okay to use?"

"We'd prefer it if you didn't, but now you know for next time," said what appeared to be the flaming top half of a skeleton sticking out of the bottom half of a black-colored snowman that wasn't remotely affected by the heat.

"Okay, so replace that with something politically correct and ask yourself this: how many of you have ever felt that the experience of drinking a potion could be far more exciting than what it actually is?" A large number of people in the crowd raised their hands and other things when they lacked hands. "All right. Didn't know if that was something people cared about, so this is good, and what's even better is that I have a way to maximize your potion drinking experience." Luz reached into the bag and pulled out a random bottle. "To start things off, who here needs a potion for fungus enhancement? Wait, 'enhancement'? That can't be right, can it?"

"Ooh, I need that!" said a woman whose head was a giant foot with polydactyly and an eyeball on each of her six toenails.

"Okay, I guess it can be right. Moving on, allow me to demonstrate a brand new way to drink your potions! Please don't explode, please don't explode."

"Calm down, it's going to be—Wait, why would something explode?" Luz ignored Viney's question as she opened up the fungus enhancement potion and hooked it to the nozzle of her invention. Once the bottle was fully secured, Luz stepped around and pulled hard on the cord dangling from the side of the invention. Whirs and clicks sounded out from it for a few seconds until a burst of gas was shot out of the nozzle and into the bottle, causing the potion to start bubbling up in front of everyone, much to their amusement.

"Yes, it worked! And it didn't explode!"

"Man, what a ripoff," King said.

"Again, why would this have exploded?" Viney asked.

"Not important anymore, but you should still be careful, just in case!" Luz said. Viney looked like she might be having second thoughts, so Luz needed to move quickly before everything was ruined. "Okay, so this little device of mine works by injecting carbon dioxide into liquids in order to produce effervescence. Effervescence is the escape of gas from an aqueous solution and the foaming or fizzing that results from that release. It sort of resembles a boiling liquid, which makes sense, because it's derived from the Latin verb _fervere_ , which means 'to boil'. Also, you can get the same effect from using nitrogen gas instead of carbon dioxide, and that's actually useful if you feel like—" Luz could tell that she was losing them. "Is soda a thing here? It makes drinking it like drinking soda."

"I _love_ soda!" the foot-headed woman said, pulling a handful of coins out of her pocket. At that moment, Luz realized that she didn't know if soda was a thing when she came up with her plan, so it was nice that it all lucked out for her. "Is twenty Snails okay?"

"As I haven't familiarized myself with the ins and outs of your economy, I'm gonna say yes." The foot-headed woman let out a disgusting squee and the two of them traded off the Snails and the effervescent potion. "Okay, I'm just gonna pull random stuff out of the bag, and if you're interested, speak up and have your wallets ready, because the Effervescerator is here to supply!" Luz pulled out a bottle that read "Essence of Tatzelwurm" and appendages went wild.

"Seriously, how likely is it that this will explode?" Viney asked.

"I've already used it once," Luz pulled the cord and sent a puff of carbon dioxide into the bottle, "now twice, so we're probably good. Probably."

"That's moderately disconcerting. Is this even safe to drink?"

"Yeah, the wealthy elites do it all the time back home. Then again, I actually don't know how this process works with magic liquids, and when I tried to explain to Eda all the negative consequences that could arise from improperly mixing chemicals, she just told me to leave and to stop being such a nerd. It was hurtful, I admit, and I honestly can't say for sure that this stuff won't explode in your stomach."

"This stuff explodes in your stomach? Sold!" A reptilian man took the Essence of Tatzelwurm out of Luz's hands and ran off after leaving some bills in her hands.

"Not a big turnoff, apparently."

"Well, I don't think I can go along with this without knowing if this is healthy. Good thing Puddles is here and can look it over."

"Puddles? That's a weird name, or maybe it's normal for witches?" Viney put down the Effervescerator and whistled with her fingers in her mouth as if she were calling a dog over. Because of that, Luz was no longer sure about the direction in which things were going to proceed.

Things became even more confusing when a horse-sized creature that looked like a giant pigeon with white wings and the body of a lion jumped between them and made Luz jump back in shock.

"What's with you? Never seen a griffin before?" King asked while curled up in a ball on the ground.

"Can't say that I have. Seen plenty of sky wolves, though. Is he like a sky wolf?"

" _She_ is nothing like whatever that is. Unless sky wolves have been trained in the practice of medicine since their rookery days, of course," Viney said while rubbing her hands through Puddles' feathers.

"I met one that a bandit trained to rip through break wires and drink lighter fluid, but I don't think that counts." Viney picked the Effervescerator back up and Luz pulled out an elixir for fang whitening that she quickly sent a puff of carbon dioxide into. "Go ahead and do your thing, girl."

"Puddles, do the thing." The thing apparently consisted of Puddles taking the elixir from Luz in one talon and using her other talon to pull out from her feathers a plastic bag containing a small, golden stick with a black snake and a white snake intertwined around it. Viney drew a blue circle of light in the air and made surgical gloves appear around Puddles' talons, after which she opened up the bag and stuck the stick into the bottle. She spun it around for a few seconds before removing it from the bottle, after which Puddles reached into her feathers once more and pulled out a small box that, after being opened, the stick was waved next to. After a few seconds, the two snakes came to life, shot into the box, and came out fighting over a live mouse; after a bit of back and forth, the white snake was able to rip the mouse away from the black snake and swallow it whole with a satisfied look on its face.

"Okay, it's official, this carbon dioxide stuff is perfectly safe," Viney said as the snakes returned to motionlessness and Puddles put everything away.

"I'll just take your word on that," Luz said, still having no idea how to process anything of the last forty-six seconds. "Okay, everyone, don't know if anyone cares, but my impromptu assistants here have now assured me that the Effervescerator is completely harmless!" No one in the crowd looked particularly impressed by that.

"But even if it won't kill you, that doesn't mean something crazy can't happen when you drink it. You'll just have to buy something to find out!" Viney said. It was rather unexpected of her, but Luz was happy for it, especially since the crowd got excited over that and started a bidding war over the fang whitening elixir.

It was an odd sensation, things going Luz's way after she had already screwed things up, but she wasn't going to ruin things for herself by questioning it.

* * *

"Okay, here's your fizzy bottle of wart replenisher, and I'll take your cash now, thank you very much," King said, handing the last bottle Eda gave them away to their last customer. "All right, we are _done_! And in only half an hour, too!"

"You sure sound chipper, all of a sudden," Luz said while she and Viney petted opposite sides of Puddles' head.

"You bet I do! Eda's never been able to sell out this fast, and she said I could have ice cream for dinner if I ever beat her time! She only said that because she thought I'd never do it, but look at me now! This is the true power of the King of—Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Out of nowhere, King lost his balance and tripped in the middle of his bragging. "I am still incredibly tired."

"Oh, I got just the thing for that," Viney said. She drew another spell circle that fired a stream of water into King's face. The water dried immediately, King spat out a fish that was somehow also involved, and his eyes fully opened and lost the glazed sheen that had persisted all day.

"I have conquered the realm of sleep!" King celebrated that fact by hopping around and doing a little dance that Luz found impossible to take her eyes off of. "For your assistance, Viney, you can be an Archduchess in my new world order once I fully reclaim my throne of power, and Puddles, as Minion #1, can be my loyal steed of darkness!"

"Huh. Neat." Viney leaned over to Luz and whispered, "None of that's actually going to happen, right?"

"No, but it's better to just go along with it," Luz whispered back. In a more audible volume, Luz said, "I gotta thank you, too, Viney. You really saved my butt back there. If you didn't step in, I would have just stood there messing around with my tinkering." Luz reached down and held up what she had created in her attempt at calming herself down. "It's a gyroscope. You use it to measure angular velocity. I'd give it to you, but I just realized I left my good gyroscope on Earth, so I'm gonna keep this, if that's okay."

"Oh, it's definitely okay," Viney said. "Also, don't even mention the stuff about being all grateful towards me. _Someone_ had to lend the one-armed girl having a panic attack in the middle of town a hand, so why not have that someone be me, right?" Viney didn't seem to understand how weird something like that sounded to Luz, and that was perfectly fine.

"This has all been so great. I got to pet an adorable bird creature, I built something that still hasn't exploded—"

"Still not super comfortable about that."

"And I am still sorry about that, but more importantly, I completed a task successfully and even managed to get a—" Luz threw a hand over her mouth, barely noticing that it hurt on account of it being her prosthetic.

"Did you mean to do that?" Viney asked.

"Sort of. Maybe. I don't know. I'd just rather have a hand over my mouth than a foot inside of it from saying something presumptuous."

"Like what?" Luz kept silent and did what she could to avoid Viney's gaze, though it was hardly an easy task. "Well, if you feel like opening up, you've got a friend right here who's ready to listen."

"That was it!" Luz, on pure instinct, jumped right in front of Viney. "I was going to say that I got a friend, but I stopped myself because I was worried that I was making too much out of this like I do every time someone other than my mom is even a little nice to me, especially since I _did_ put you in a situation where you could have blown up, but if you're saying it, that means it's true! I really do have a friend my own age and morphology! Right?"

"Right. You're kind of an odd turtle-duck, but I think I like that about you, and considering that you didn't actually blow me up, I would love to be your friend." Luz let out a tiny squeal that would have embarrassed her under normal circumstances, but she was too happy for the thought to cross her mind.

The thought began to approach it when Puddles suddenly spat a clutter of spiders into her face.

"Look, even Puddles likes you! How could I _not_ want to be friends with someone Puddles likes?"

"Right, right. Hate to see what he does with people he hates," Luz said, doing her best to nonchalantly brush the spiders off of her face.

"Don't be so squeamish, Luz. You're not going to be able to survive on the Boiling Isles if you let something like face spiders get to you," King said. Puddles then spat another cluster of spiders onto King, after which he immediately started screaming and rolling around on the ground. "Agh! They're in my fur and under my bones! Minion #1, you've betrayed me! Was I not a just overlord? Answer me!" Puddles responded by spitting more spiders onto King, enhancing all of the previous actions.

"Wow, two upchucks in a row. Puddles must _really_ like King," Viney said. Luz was more than happy to let King receive enough love from Puddles for the both of them. "Well, we need to go home now, but what's your plan for the rest of the day?"

"King and I need to make some deliveries, and then we've got the whole rest of the day free," Luz said. "Ideally, I'd get Eda to try and teach me some magic, but I don't think doing good for one day will get her to do much of anything, even if it's a rare instance of me succeeding at something two days in a row, so I was going to try and buy a book about it, but Eda only gave me twenty Snails for spending money, and that's barely anything. Or is it surprisingly generous? Like I said, I don't know how your economy works."

"I want to say that's enough, but it really depends on the store you use. Still, if you want to save your money, might as well just go to the library."

The words Viney said nearly had enough impact to make Luz fall over right where she stood.

"Library? You-You people have a library?" Luz asked.

"Should we not have a library?" Viney asked.

"Of course you should, libraries are a vital tool for furthering the education of the general public, but it's just here? In the middle of a densely populated town? Where everyone can easily be infected by the nuclear radiation emanating from it?" Viney looked at her as if she had sprouted a second head, which wasn't impossible, considering the fact that the town was apparently infected with nuclear radiation.

"Yeah, that's not a thing we have going on. Even if it was, are you telling me that radiation poisoning is something humans can die from? You can't just eat some soup and sleep it off?" Luz shook her head while feeling both astounded and disturbed by the biology of the common witch.

"If going to the library really is fine, then I guess I should do that. Just to be safe, where can I buy enough plastic to make a hazmat suit?"

"I don't know what that is, but no." And that was that, and Luz accepted that surprisingly fast. It probably helped that King was still rolling around with spiders all over him, which would never not be funny.

* * *

Luz and King said their goodbyes to Viney and Puddles and started making their deliveries around town, her glider doing a lot to cut down on travel time. Some of the deliveries didn't go too well on account of people trying to eat Luz, but most of the people they met with were actually happy to meet her, apparently seeing videos of her selling potions and elixirs online. Luz didn't know what most of those words meant, and someone showing her just confused her more because of how the recording of her was somehow able to be in color, but if it kept people from trying to attack her, then she was okay with it. Within the span of half an hour, they had finished their deliveries and it was finally time to go to the library.

"Are we going in, or are you just going to stand out here and look at it?" was what King asked when it had been five minutes since their arrival and Luz had done nothing but look at the library.

"Right. Gotta do that. I'm not feeling woozy and I don't want to vomit, so that must mean it passes the first test," Luz said. "Okay, let's do this thing!" Luz pulled her goggles down over her eyes. "Cautiously!" With much trepidation, Luz stepped inside the library with King close behind her. "Okay, my skin isn't burning and I'm not being hit with a sudden feeling of diarrhea, so the library passes the second test. Still gonna keep the goggles on, just in case."

"If you're gonna be like this, we should just go home and get my ice cream dinner started."

"No, I'll be good, and you can have plenty of fun here! Look!" Luz directed King's attention to a colorful paper sign with letters that were literally sparkling. "They're having storytime in the Kid's Corner. That sounds like fun, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, if you're a baby, and the King of Demons being a baby would be a complete parallelogram."

"You mean paradox?"

"Yeah, one of those, too!" It was hard for Luz to fight the urge to roll her eyes. "The point is that I'm not doing it!"

"There's a little blurb on the bottom saying that there'll be milk and cookies."

"The King of Demons accepts this proposal. Begrudgingly, of course." King said that, but he still happily ran in the direction the sign was pointing in. With that, Luz was all alone. In a giant building filled to the brim with books. That wouldn't kill her or force her to void her bowels if she spent too much time near any of it.

"This is the best thing to ever happen in my life," Luz said to the only person who needed to hear it. Luz knew that she was only there to get books about magic, but it was too good of an opportunity to be squandered, so she tied her glider to her back, stuffed her toolbox into Eda's long since empty bag, and started running around the entirety of the building to explore, except for the part where she ended up grabbing onto a floating book and was carried through the air in a line of other floating books. She didn't actually grab anything to read; she certainly would, but at that moment, the simple pleasure of being around books that weren't covered in filth, burnt to the point of near illegibility or would be perfectly fine if they didn't have to be obtained by risking people's lives on a dangerous heist for something few people understood the value of was just something she simply wanted to bask in for all of its glory. The entire experience was something she had only ever dreamed of, and it was hard to imagine anything putting a damper on it.

What came close to that, however, was Luz suddenly being hit in the face by a bookshelf in the middle of her aimless wandering and being thrown to the floor.

_If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd have six nickels_ , Luz thought. As she picked herself up, she saw a golden-eyed, green-haired girl with her bangs pulled back into a ponytail—on a side note, Luz couldn't help but notice that there was a spot of brown there—stepping out from behind the bookshelf. The girl was wearing a gray tunic with magenta sleeves and leggings, the conventionality and uniformity of it making her believe it was some sort of uniform, and she also seemed to be carrying a book in her arms. Luz didn't get a good look at it, but the second the girl presumably noticed that Luz was looking at her, she threw it under her armpit and turned to her with a scowl.

"This isn't—What are you even doing here? What kind of person actually goes in the romance section?" the girl asked. A sign hanging from the offending bookshelf told Luz that that was, indeed, where she had wandered off to.

"The same kind of person as you, probably," Luz said. She looked like she was about to say something before stopping herself, probably because she realized the hole she dug herself into with her previous question. "More specifically, what kind of person spends their time literally behind a bookshelf? Wait, hold on." Luz's eyes fell to the floor. "The curvature of the shelf's swing, plus these scuff marks that indicate this happening multiple times over," Luz turned back to the girl with a smile, "means that you just came out of a hidden room! Right? Tell me I'm right."

"I refuse." The girl was incapable of looking Luz in the eye when she said that.

"I _knew_ it! What's back there, a treasure chamber? Hidden dungeon? Secret torture chamber? Come on, spill the beans!"

"What beans do you expect me to spill? I'm clearly not eating a burrito right now." It was hard to tell if that happened because "spill the beans" wasn't an expression in the Demon Realm or if the girl simply didn't understand what the expression meant. "It's not a treasure chamber, the dungeon is on the other side of the library, and the torture chamber was decommissioned and turned into a snooker room last week!"

"Well, that's disappointing." Luz slumped her shoulders for a second before quickly pulling them back up. "The part about there being no treasure, I mean, not the part about the torture chamber. If anything, it's disturbing that a civilized society like this one presumably took so long to get rid of something so archaic."

"I know, right? We don't need junk like that, so what were we even keeping it for? An ode to the Savage Ages when something like that would fly? Come on."

"Exactly. Don't know anything about that last part, but exactly!"

"What do you mean you don't—Wait a minute." The girl leaned in close and ran her eyes down Luz's body; Luz could tell from how her eyes were moving that she started at her head and ended at her arm. "You're that human girl everyone's been posting about on Penstagram, aren't you?"

"Yes, and I'll tell you now that I only understand what you're saying because of some stuff other people showed me. I get that 'posting' is kind of like putting a notice on a bulletin board, but where is this board? I've been about town for a while, and I haven't seen anything. Have you?"

"That's not—Oh my God, how could I let myself agree with you about anything?" Luz shrugged her shoulders, but that just made the girl glare at her.

"You're mad, aren't you? I can tell that you're mad, and you've probably been mad from the start. I'm sorry if I annoyed you, so let's start over: Hi, I'm Luz." Luz stuck out her left hand for the girl to shake. The girl, however, remained motionless as she kept staring at Luz before eventually saying, "Amity."

"Nice to meet you, Amity. Also, you forgot to shake my hand. Is that not a thing here? See, the way it works is—"

"I know how to shake a hand, I just refuse to shake yours. Also, your glasses are cracked."

"I don't wear—You mean my goggles?" Luz finally noticed the multitude of cracks interfering with her vision. "Huh. How about that? Must have been too caught up with the thought of free treasure to notice."

"Seriously? That is so—Whatever, just stand still." Luz did as Amity asked and watched her draw a magenta circle of light in the air. A similarly-colored light washed over her goggles, and by the time it faded, Luz's goggles were back to normal. "Consider that an apology for me cracking them in the first place, among other things." The second part of that sentence was quieter than the first. "Also, tell anyone about my hideout and I'll kill you until you're dead."

"Duly noted." Amity drew another spell circle and the bookshelf moved to be back in alignment with the other ones against the wall. She started walking away from the scene, her book now against her chest with only the back cover facing out, but Luz followed her at a respectable distance. "So, Amity, you seem like a well-versed, multi-talented witch. Would you mind pointing me in the direction of some guides to using magic, or something in that ballpark? Better yet, maybe try and teach me a spell or three? I already have a teacher, but it'd be nice to get a few different points of view."

"I'm not pointing you in the direction of anything, and I'm definitely not teaching you anything," Amity said as the two of them kept walking.

"Okay, you not wanting to teach me anything is perfectly reasonable, but why can't you tell me where to find books on using magic? If you didn't get it already, I kind of want to learn how to do that."

"No, I got that, but why should I bother getting involved with a fool's errand like that?" Taking a warranted amount of offense to that, Luz quickened her pace and jumped right in front of Amity.

"I'll have you know that I am no fool, so I don't see how any of my errands could ever be described like that."

"And that just makes it worse." Amity stepped around Luz and the two of them returned to their previous arrangement.

"Okay, care to explain _why_?"

"Because you're a human. Only witches can use magic, so since you're a human and _not_ a witch, that means you can't use magic, which makes any attempt you would make to learn magic a fool's errand." Luz was hardly a fan of the matter-of-fact tone Amity was speaking with.

"You don't know that for sure, though. Humans don't live here, and it's not like there's a long history of humans and witches interacting with each other, is there?" Amity shook her head. "There, see? You people barely know anything about humans, so how can you say for sure that humans can't use magic if you don't even know anything about humans?"

"Because unlike you, I don't live in a fantasy world."

"I'm actually more of a sci-fi girl, actually, and that doesn't mean I shouldn't be allowed to at least try, right?"

"It might as well. There's no point in doing something if you know for a fact that you're not suited for it."

"But no one really knows what they're suited for until they try it. People always told me I needed to stop trying to invent things, but I keep doing it, no matter how many times it blows up in my face. Hell, I bet people thought you couldn't make the green hair work, but you're clearly rocking that look. There's a little bit of your roots showing, but—You know, that works, too. Meshes well with the green, gives it a whole chocolate mint kind of vibe. Anyone ever tell you—"

"Enough!" The two of them stopped as Amity turned around and glared at Luz with a flush of red washing over her face. "I would honestly _love_ to see you try and use magic, human. If you're half as good at being a witch as you are at building random garbage like that big box thing or—" Amity took a pause, but Luz was feeling too annoyed to try and analyze it. "Yeah, it would be a real laugh riot, and I would _love_ to see it blow up in your face, figuratively or otherwise."

"Hey, you don't get to insult me like that. Only the people who I grew up with and are the closest thing I have to family get to insult me like that, and if I'm not cool with them doing it, I'm definitely not cool with you doing it!"

"I. Don't. Care. Do whatever you want to keep this farce going, just stop bugging me about it." Amity turned away from Luz and went back to her walk. Luz let out a huff as she pulled her goggles away from her eyes, no longer wanting to wear something tainted by the magic of a girl like her.

_I guess that hot streak I'm on is only in regards to doing my job, not making friends_ , Luz thought. With that in mind, Luz walked away from the scene, no longer having a reason to be in that part of the library.

Only to run into Amity again after about fifteen seconds.

"Stop following me!" Amity said.

"I'm not following you!" Luz said. "I'm going to where my friend is; not my fault it happens to be in the same direction you're going in."

"You better not be lying." The two of them walked in silence for another minute before Amity accused Luz of doing exactly that.

"I told you, I'm not lying. King is in the Kid's Corner right now, and that's where I'm going. If my presence really offends you so much, just stay here for thirty seconds and go wherever it is you're going."

"Did you say your friend is at the Kid's Corner?" Luz nodded her head, and Amity let out a groan. It was now obvious that the two were heading to the exact same location. As such, they walked together in silence until they reached the Kid's Corner, where King was in the middle of eating and drinking a large assortment of milk and cookies. Amity stepped ahead of Luz and sat down in an empty chair in front of a nearby window, her mystery book quickly being tucked underneath it.

"Wait, are _you_ the one in charge of storytime? You read to children? That's unexpectedly precious," Luz said with a small laugh.

"This is for extra credit, human," Amity said. "Don't make a thing about it, just grab your talking dog and get out of here."

"No. He's here for storytime, so he's staying for storytime. And you know what?" Luz pulled a random book out from the first bookshelf she saw that was within arm's length. "I didn't see an age limit on that sign, so I'm staying, too. Just gonna stay here and read this comic book while I listen to you try and convince children you're not a jerk, if that's all right with you." Luz opened up the book to help get her point started.

"As I said before, do whatever you want. By the way, that's not a comic, that's a manga. You read it right to left, not left to right." Luz stared at her apparently backward book for a few seconds before flipping it around.

"Yeah, I knew that. I was just testing you to see if you were as smart as you act like you are. The jury's still out on that, of course." Amity glared at Luz again, and Luz steeled herself for another verbal lashing that she would be ready to counter. What she wasn't ready for, however, was for Amity to flash her devil horns without saying anything and turn away from her.

"Um, rock and roll, I guess?" Amity said nothing and Luz sat down next to King. It was an odd non sequitur amongst non sequiturs, but for as little as it was worth, at least Luz was able to confirm that heavy metal existed on the Boiling Isles.

"Boy, she sure is a piece of work," King said, giving Luz one of his cookies and a plastic cup of milk.

"You're telling me," Luz said. She didn't want to stay angry at Amity, though. For the most part, her day had been going surprisingly well, and if Luz, herself, wasn't going to be the one to ruin it, then there was no reason to let someone like Amity do it.

_Not gonna let her get to me. Just gonna sit with King and listen to storytime out of spite, ask a librarian for help because they have no choice in the matter, and get out of here. In the meantime, I'll see what this manga thing is all about_ , Luz thought, flipping through the pages of the book. _Huh. The art kind of reminds me of the picture that was on Viney's shirt. Neat._ Luz flipped through more pages. _Wow, these girls are barely wearing anything. Might as well be butt naked. How long do they let you check out books for, exactly?_

The book might have ended up getting too close to her face, but she managed to move it away just as a gaggle of small children with varying degrees of monstrous features started running in and grabbing their snacks; Luz noted that they were all wearing the same kind of outfit as Amity, but with gray sleeves and leggings, which confirmed to her that it was supposed to be some kind of uniform.

A red-skinned child whose entire head seemed to just be a mouth sat down next to Luz and said, "Your arm looks funny," his voice being unnaturally deep for someone so small. Suffice to say, Luz moved as far away from him as she could without being rude.

"Miss Amity, why is there a big kid with a funny arm here?" a random child asked.

"Ignore her, children. She has nothing of value to contribute to society, so she's not worth your time," Amity said. With every passing second, it became easier and easier for Luz to spite her. After that, the scowl on Amity's face switched over to a smile without skipping a beat. "Okay, children, who's ready for another rousing session of the Amity Blight Story Time?" The children all let out cries of excitement.

"Read one of those stories where everyone dies at the end to teach us a lesson about some nonsense!" King said. Amity went back to scowling.

"Quiet in the peanut gallery, please." Luz took a bit of joy from watching King blow her a raspberry at Amity. "Anyway," Amity quickly went back to smiling, "I hope you're all ready to have a good time, because today's story is—" Amity brushed her hand against the empty table next to her. "Today's story is—" Amity pawed the table several times before removing her hand, at which point she had stopped smiling. "Today's story is a really great one that you're all going to love!"

"What is it, already?" King asked, the other children quickly joining in on it.

"Good question, and it's a question that will be answered momentarily." Amity jumped out of her chair and started walking all around the Kid's Corner. It wasn't as if she was methodically pacing around the area; Luz had done enough of that in her life to recognize when someone was or wasn't doing it. Amity, instead, did a variety of things like running along bookcases just to let out a groan when she got to the end of them, pulling bookshelves away from the walls and sticking her head behind them just to end up with dust in her hair, and repeatedly lifting the small table off the ground in a vain hope that something would miraculously appear out of thin air.

Luz could tell that Amity had messed up in some regard and was desperately trying to remedy the situation. What made it worse was that the children were starting to get agitated and openly complaining about the lack of storytime, their aggravations heightened by King egging them for whatever reason, and that made her frantic searching even worse. With how much Amity had made her mad just a few minutes ago, Luz thought that she'd be happy with the kind of scene before her, but she wasn't. As it turned out, everything that was happening hit far too close to home for her liking, and deja vu turned out to not be something she could get behind.

It was for that reason that Luz put down her stuff, walked over to Amity as she was pulling back another bookshelf, and tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention.

"What do you want?" Luz wasn't surprised that Amity was glaring at her when she pulled her head out, but she would have to deal with it.

"You lost the book you were gonna read, didn't you?" Luz whispered.

"I didn't lose it, it's just not here, anymore," Amity whispered back while brushing dust out of her hair. "I left it right on that table in preparation of storytime, and now it's just gone, and I don't know why!"

"If you just left it out on a table, a librarian probably put it away."

"No, because the librarians knew that I was reading today, so they wouldn't touch it. Even if they did, it's not on any of the shelves. I bet this is something those two did, and if it was, I swear I'll—" Amity shut her mouth and went back to walking along bookshelves, Luz following close behind her.

"Can't you just read a new book? Shouldn't be too hard to find one, considering where we are."

"Impossible. I spent three hours selecting the perfect book that would appeal to the interests of everyone who would be showing up today, and by the sound of things, I don't even have three minutes to do that." The children were, indeed, starting to get more and more agitated thanks to King.

"What about that book you brought with you? You can read that one."

"Never! I only brought that book with me because I'm supposed to go home the second I'm done with this. Besides, that book is, um, not appropriate for children." It seemed to be a clear lie, but Luz didn't call attention to it. "I should have known something like this would happen. They told me to just stick with the books provided for me, but all of a sudden, that wasn't good enough for me. All of a sudden, I wanted to try doing something all on my own, even when people thought it was a bad idea. I messed it all up and for what? Because I wanted to make these kids happy through my own choices? This is what happens when you try and do the things _you_ want to do, I guess."

Luz truly was uncomfortable with deja vu.

"Hey, Amity—"

"Don't talk to me. I don't want your pity. I-I don't even know why I'm saying any of this to you." Amity turned back to the children and, in a more audible voice, said, "Okay, so while the story I originally had planned for you would have been great, one of the ones set aside by the head librarian will be even better, assuming you ignore the predictability and cliches of it all. If you could all just give a few minutes to head over to the front desk—"

"You've had plenty of time, now give us what we paid for!" King interjected.

"This whole thing is free to the public, and it would only take—"

"No! You think we'll be silenced for that long? In your dreams! We demand instant gratification! We haven't done anything to earn it, but we deserve it, and we deserve it, now! Who's with me?" The other children followed suit on King's proposition and started loudly demanding from Amity the story she simply didn't have. To Luz, it looked like the pressure of it all was getting to Amity based on the cold sweat she was breaking out into and how much she looked like she was about to vomit, two things Luz had more than enough personal experience with in her long history of failure.

For the third time now, Luz had to take note of how much she hated deja vu, and she didn't want to go through that a fourth time.

"Hey, everyone! Watch this!" While barely putting any thought into it, Luz stepped in front of King and the children and pulled off her prosthetic arm. Much to her relief, the act succeeded in calming everyone down and eliciting a series of "Oohs" and "Aahs" from the children.

"I wanna pull my arm off!" the mouth-headed child said.

"No, you can't do that!" Luz turned to Amity, who was still looking rattled, and she confirmed the statement with a nod. "Yeah, you can't do that. It's just a me-thing."

"Why is your arm not your real arm? Is it a curse?" one child asked.

"Did you trade it for magic beans?" another child asked.

"Did you have to gnaw it off to escape a deadly trap and get back to kicking someone's butt?" King asked.

"No, nothing like that," Luz said, popping her arm back in place. "The real story is a lot more exciting than any of that. Would you all like to hear it?" King and the children all let out a cheer. "All right, here we go." Luz turned back to Amity for a brief moment and moved her head in the direction away from the Kid's Corner, hoping she would take her chance to leave and get a new book "It was a dark and stormy night, the kind of night where you think each clap of thunder will be the one that tears the world in two. Most people would be too afraid to fly through all of that, but then again, most people weren't Luz Noceda and her trusty crew of sky pirates who all love and support her, the Laputas! No storm was too fierce for us, no defenses were too high for us, and no battle was too tough for us, not when there was a big score on the line, and tonight was the biggest score of them all: the legendary Pompoko Diamond, a jewel so big that you could fit it inside a deluxe-sized steam engine and not even have room for the steam."

"Is that big?" one child asked.

"Yes." They all expressed their excitement over that fact. "Getting the Pompoko Diamond would have you set for this life and next, so when we heard that it was the cargo of an imperial transport blimp, we knew it had to be ours and set off to intercept. Unfortunately, our many rivals all had the same idea, so it became a race to the blimp as a simultaneous dogfight occurred. The darkness of the night sky only made everyone visible when it was lit up with lightning, and the heavy rain was enough to drown out the sounds of the flying bullets, so you would never know if you were hit until it actually happened."

"Did you get hit?" one child asked.

"No, because I wasn't involved in that." That received the reaction she expected it to receive, but that didn't stop it from hurting. "I wasn't involved in that because I had a very important job of manning the engine room and making sure we would be able to get there before the others." There was still a lack of fanfare from her audience, and that time, she was surprised by it. "So! So imagine my surprise when I saw that some of our rival pirates, the Endor Collegiates, had snuck on board to destroy us from the inside!" That got her the fanfare she was looking for.

"I saw three of them running about as I was making my way back from a routine checkup on the steam gauges, and I knew I had to act fast to stop them. I grabbed one from behind and jammed my knee hard into his stomach before he had the chance to know what was going on. The other two came at me with their electrified swords, but I was quick enough on my feet to jump out of the way and put some distance between us. It turned out that that was what they wanted, though, as the tips of their blades opened up and fired bullets at me!" There were a few gasps from the audience, and even an, "Oh, no!" It was going great. "I dove behind a corner for some cover. If it was a shootout they wanted, then it was a shootout they were going to get! I pulled out my gun from its holster like so, and—" In her attempt at a demonstration, Luz moved too quickly and accidentally dropped her revolver onto the ground. Because of that, her momentum became lost to her, and all thoughts of how the story would keep moving faded away like dust in the wind.

The pressure of the deafening silence of the Kid's Corner felt as if it were going to flatten her like a steamroller.

"Well? What happened next?" King asked.

"Um, okay, so, the thing that happened next—"

"Was that the two pirates from the Endor Collegiate took advantage of her clumsiness, rounded the corner, and drew their blades against her neck!" Amity suddenly cut in and put the tip of a ballpoint pen against her throat. In all the excitement, Luz hadn't noticed that Amity hadn't left to get a new book. That was one thing, in and of itself, but to see her going along with Luz's story was something else, entirely.

"In an ideal world, doing something like that would be a difficult feat, but with an opponent like a Laputa, it was child's play," Amity said. Luz was still confused, but then she saw the look in Amity's eyes. The kind of look that said, "Hurry up and get yourself back together so I'm not the only one looking like an idiot!" Little reason to slack off on that, so Luz picked up her revolver and went back to the show.

"But that's what I _wanted_ them to do!" Luz said. "I knew that I wouldn't be able to take them both on in a shootout, so I let them think I messed up so they'd go back to melee."

"Didn't you say you _wanted_ to fight them like that?" one child asked.

""Unreliable narration is a legitimate trope, kids,"" Luz and Amity said in unison, much to the surprise of both of them.

"Anyway, my reflexes were good enough for me to pick up my revolver and shoot them right then and there," Luz said. "The two of them were blown back and defeated, but I couldn't let my guard down. If those three could get in, then there were probably others about, so I needed to hurry to the engine room and set up security measures."

"Unfortunately for Luz, while her hunch was correct, she was far too slow to properly act on it," Amity said. "Luz had barely even gotten halfway to the engine room when she was ambushed by more pirates of the Endor Collegiate, all of them wielding harpes made of the finest adamant." King and the children seemed impressed by that, which was more than Luz could say for herself.

"Why am I being attacked with stubborn musical instruments?" Luz whispered.

"A harpe is a sickle used for exterminating demons, and adamant is a holy metal harder than steel. How do you not know this?" Amity asked, also whispering.

"Because we don't have that stuff on Earth. Why am I fighting people with weapons that shouldn't exist?"

"That is actually a good point." In a more audible volume, Amity said, "Luz did not know where these foreign weapons of foreign materials came from, but if they were in the hands of the Endor Collegiate, then they had to be trouble."

"Decent enough save, I suppose." In a more audible volume, Luz said, "Yes, I could tell just by looking at these strange weapons that had to have been procured through alien means that I was in for the fight of my life. However, the same could easily be said of them, because Luz Noceda gave up on things just as easily as any other Laputa, which was not easily in the slightest!"

"That would hardly matter to the Endor Collegiate, of course, and they were more than ready for a fight."

"A fight I was more than ready to give them!"

* * *

"When the Mother Dragon breathed her last breath of fire, the wound Luz suffered defending her from the chaotic rend of Urizen the Breaker was sealed, and while her arm was forever lost, she would not die from the resulting blood loss, nor would she die from the chaos Urizen attempted to instill in her."

"I was very fortunate, and it was an experience I knew I could never forget for as long as I lived. Her work finished, the Mother Dragon used her photon rays to burn Urizen's corpse to dust and flew off into the horizon, the Pompoko Diamond returned to her eye socket where it belonged."

"The Laputas took their leave once they knew that there was no chance of the Mother Dragon coming back, and the sun finally began to shine through what seemed like an endless darkness."

"We might not have gotten a diamond that night, but we still went home richer than we ever could have dreamed."

""The end."" Luz and Amity took a bow as their audience applauded them. The story escalated far beyond what Luz had planned out when it all started, but it seemed like the two of them were able to pace themselves enough to make it work. It was surprising that they were able to achieve that, but not nearly as surprising as the fact that Luz and Amity were able to work together, at all. An hour ago, she never would have pegged Amity as the kind of person with even an ounce of creativity in her body, yet there they were, basking in the glow of a story well told. It wasn't as euphoric a feeling as that of an invention well invented, but there was no reason not to be happy about it, either way.

"Okay, that's all for today. See you all next time," Amity said. The children all ran out of the Kid's Corner full of laughter and King ran off saying something about wanting to steal more cookies. The mouth-headed kid was the last one to leave, and he only did so after hugging the two of them and thanking "Miss Amity" and "Miss Luz" for a fun time.

"You know, that one's kind of grown on me," Luz said.

"Braxas will do that to you," Amity said. With that, it was just the two of them by themselves, once more, the silence between them startlingly appropriate.

"So." Luz was the first to try and break it. "Not bad with the improv. I didn't think you were so quick on your feet."

"Neither did I. I guess years of writing fanfiction finally managed to pay off a little." Out of nowhere, Amity shot Luz a glare. "That doesn't leave this building if you know what's good for you."

"It's fine. I honestly have no idea what that is." Amity let out a breath. "Still, you could use some work with reading the scene. At some point, you should have been able to figure out what would and wouldn't make sense to be on Earth, and it got really annoying to have to keep saying that something appeared or was gained through unknown means. It's not like my original draft didn't embellish on the actual story, but you made it _so_ much harder on me."

"Oh, and like you were any better, Ms. 'I think this enemy should be a star-crossed lover of mine'?"

"You're the one who said she was my rival. Am I _not_ supposed to assume we were secretly in love with each other?" Amity looked at her as if she were speaking total nonsense. The nerve of some people. "Speaking of which, did you really have to kill her off?"

"There was no other way to make the scene progress organically, and you know it."

"Agree to disagree, but we can think about it for next time."

"Then I guess we'll be thinking about it for all eternity, since there isn't going to be a next time," Amity said with a pout.

"You sure? They seemed to like our routine, and I'm pretty sure one of them asked if we could perform at their birthday party."

"I don't care. This was a one-time thing, and nothing's going to change that." Amity's face softened a little. "That being said, thank you for helping me. Looking back on it, I was harsher towards you than I needed to be, and I wouldn't have blamed you if you had just decided to watch me flounder out there, but you did the exact opposite of that."

"I was way too close to actually doing that, and I would have if I wasn't getting so much deja vu." Amity simply stared at her. "Basically, I've been in the same situation as you have too many times to count, and I didn't like watching someone go through what I always go through, even if that someone was kind of a jerk to me. Then again, I did my fair share of bugging that someone, so how about we call it even?"

"That works for me, Luz." It took a few seconds for Amity to say her name, and immediately after doing so, she stuck out her left hand. "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Shake it. Is that not a thing where you're from? See, the way it works is—"

"Okay, I get what you're doing, so wipe that look off your face." Amity didn't do that, but Luz shook her hand, regardless.

"All right, that's enough." Amity broke the handshake after five seconds and pulled her book out from under her chair, still positioning it so only the back cover was showing. "Come on, let's go get your books."

"Wait, now you _want_ to help me? Did I change your opinion about me that much?" Amity turned enough away so Luz couldn't see her face.

"Don't make this out for more than what it is. The idea of a human being able to use magic is still stupid and not even worth considering, but I suppose there isn't anything wrong with a human wanting to learn about magic, and if I point you in the right direction, you won't have to worry about whether or not the books you're reading are worth reading. You probably need a library card, too, so let's start with that." Luz let out a tiny squeal that would have embarrassed her under normal circumstances, but she was too happy for the thought to cross her mind. "Let's go, already!"

Luz quieted herself, grabbed her stuff, and followed Amity out of the Kid's Corner. It seemed like she jumped the gun a bit to assume that her euphoria meant that it was the same situation as the one with Viney, but that didn't mean that there wasn't anything there.

Considering what she used to have to contend with, she would take anything on the opposite end of the spectrum the universe threw at her, no matter how insignificant it might have been.

* * *

With Amity's help, Luz was able to leave the library with a large stack of books, some about magic, some about the history of the Boiling Isles, and as soon as she and King returned to the Owl House, she started reading through them as quickly and methodically as she possibly could. While she did, King recounted to Eda everything they did that day, which was all accurate enough for her to not bother saying anything about it.

"And then there was this one guy who said he was a wizard who wanted to send Luz on a magical chosen one quest, but thanks to me, she didn't listen to a word he had to say," King said from the dining table.

"Good instincts. Anyone who actually calls themselves a wizard is never up to any good. Same with those super edgy guys who call themselves 'warlocks'," Eda said, sitting across from him.

"That and there's no way that a chosen one-type thing could really exist," Luz said, still reading her books from the couch and currently on book six out of fifteen, twenty if she counted the five volumes of manga she checked out for purely educational purposes. "Honestly, it was kind of insulting that he tried to make me think that having that one thing would help me solve all of my problems. I mean, I know they're not the same thing, but with inventions, every one of them is unique, and you can't just make some sort of master blueprint that lets you build anything you want. It takes a lot of work to get that stuff right, and magic shouldn't be any different."

"Exactly what I said, more or less," King said as he took in a big spoon of ice cream from a proportionally large bowl.

"I still can't believe I actually had to make good on that bet. That gas thing you built must really be something else, Luz," Eda said while eating a parfait.

"Not really; it honestly could have been better," Luz said between bites on an ice cream sandwich. "Viney's the one you really have to thank. If she didn't lend me a hand when she did, I would have just stood there working on my gyroscope. Come to think of it, it actually does need a little work. I'll save it for tomorrow, though."

"Hey, whatever makes you happy. I'm just glad it didn't take that long for you to make a couple of friends." Hearing the word again made Luz feel warm from head to toe, her prosthetic being the obvious place where that feeling didn't occur.

"Yeah—Wait, no, it's not plural. Viney's the only one who's my friend, whereas Amity is, well, I don't know what Amity is."

"A jerk, as far as I can tell," King said.

"Not a total jerk, though. We came together through improv, and she lent me a hand in my pursuit of knowledge. She even helped me get a library card." Luz held up the card for all to see.

"Wow, that is one _ugly_ picture, hoot," Hooty said, sliding into the room out of nowhere.

"It is, isn't it? Why do they always use the sneezing picture?" Eda shrugged her shoulders, and it seemed like that would be that. "More importantly, there was a moment when she let out a slew of insults at me, and even though she was being mean, she stopped herself from saying anything about my arm. That's always an easy target for people, but she stopped herself from going there. I don't know, I just think that means _something_."

"Okay, I'll give her that." King ate more ice cream with obvious frustration. "But she still never apologized for flipping you off, so what does that say?"

"I mean, it's kind of an unspoken, 'let bygones be bygones' kind of thing, so—" Luz stopped herself as King's statement fully sunk in. "Wait, what do you mean she flipped me off? When?"

"When she did this, obviously." King folded down one of his fingers and gave his best impression of devil horns.

"Wait, that's how you flip people off here? On Earth, that's just what you do when you're trying to rock out. Huh." Many things were starting to make sense to Luz, now.

"Wait, so how do humans flip each other off, then?"

"I mean, there's a bunch of different ways. Some people pull an eyelid down and stick out their tongue, some do the eyelid thing while twisting their hand with their thumb to their temple, but I guess the people I know mostly do this one." Luz quickly demonstrated for everyone in the room.

"Hold on, _that's_ how humans flip each other off?" Eda asked, sounding more surprised that Luz would have guessed her to. "You know, I actually dated a human once, and he told me that meant 'Peace among worlds'. What a dick."

"That's definitely a story I want to hear more about one day, but back to Amity, like I said, bygones being bygones, unspoken truce and whatnot, that kind of—Oh my God!" Luz dropped her ice cream sandwich to the floor and jumped up off the couch; King was quick to start eating the ice cream sandwich off the floor, and she was too frazzled to think about whether or not that was okay. "Eda! Eda!"

"Luz! Luz!" Eda said, not amusing Luz in the slightest. "Seriously, what is it?"

"Okay, so I'm reading Elena Petrovsky's _Mastering the Absolute: A Theosophical Theorem On the Inner Mechanics of Witchcraft_ because Amity said that she was the most brilliant mind to be born in Lemuria and helped establish the modern standards of witchcraft when I come across _this_ page!" Luz held out in front of Eda a page that displayed an illustration of a heart with a large, green protrusion sticking out like a tumor.

"What am I looking at?"

"A big revelation for me! Did you know that witches can use magic because they have a sac of magic bile attached to their hearts?"

"Of course. Any witch worth their salt knows something basic like that."

"Yeah, but _I_ didn't know that. I don't know if you know this, but humans don't have sacs of bile attached to their hearts, so how am I supposed to use magic if I don't have that?"

"Well, that's easy. All you have to do is…" Eda's mouth quickly closed up. In the middle of her pause, one of her hands detached itself, crawled up her body, and scratched the back of her head. "Huh. That's a good point. Never thought about that before, and if I'm being honest, I don't know. Back in the old days, witches were able to use magic through other means, but there's very little information on that still around, and I never bothered to look around for what little we have."

"Well, isn't that just fantastic?"

"Really? I thought for sure you'd find it soul-crushing because it would make you wonder what the whole point of coming here even was. Guess no one has a brain like mine, hoot!" Hooty said while right up in Luz's face. Fortunately, Hooty backed off in a panic when Luz slammed her book shut right in front of him.

"Hey, don't worry, kid. I'm sure we'll figure something out," Eda said.

"Yeah. Maybe you could use all your science knowhow to build a fake bile sac like you built a fake arm," King said while wiping ice cream off of his face.

"Come on, there's no way I could do that," Luz said. A moment later, the proverbial light bulb went off above her head. "Or maybe I could? Artificial organs _are_ a thing for humans, so it could be a thing here. Ah, but it's probably not a good idea to try building one with just pictures and diagrams for reference. Eda, I know your hands are detachable, but can you also make your chest open up?"

"Nope, and I don't feel like learning how to do that," Eda said as her hand reattached itself to her arm. "Lucky for you, I know a lot of people who can help you get your hands on a bile sac."

"What, doctors? Morticians?"

"She means organ traffickers," Hooty said. Beggars could not be choosers, she supposed, and Eda used her magic to summon a notepad out of thin air.

"Okay, who can we go to for this?" Eda asked as she ran a finger down the notepad. "He's dead, she's in jail, she's dead, he's in jail, dead, dead, prison, prison, prison, died in prison, died, _then_ went to prison, prison, prison, dead, dead, okay, what about—Wait, I just remembered that these things aren't really any good for study if they're not fresh. We probably need a fresh one, right?" Luz nodded her head. "Okay, then that knocks about a dozen more people off of the list and leaves just one guy we can go to. Unfortunately, he's no good to us right now because he's going to spend the next six months recovering from his Pilates injury."

"Really? Pilates?" Luz asked. "Isn't that kind of—"

"Pilates is a demon that eats your genitals," King cut in.

"Never mind, I don't know anything."

"Trust me, Luz, you do _not_ want to mess with that guy, even if he does make great pasta," Hooty said. There were a multitude of things being implied by that statement, and for the sake of her mental health, Luz electively chose to think about none of them as Hooty slinked out of the room.

"Well, looks like that's a dead end. Sorry, kid, but like I said, we'll think of something. Not like we're on a ticking clock or anything," Eda said, making the notepad vanish. Eda was right to say that, but it didn't make the reality of the situation any less frustrating. It wasn't as if she had gone into this without understanding that she would have her work cut out for her, but she didn't think she'd be fighting so uphill a battle that she'd have to work around not even having the most basic of materials. She wanted to believe Eda when she said that they'd figure something out, but so long as that was just wishful thinking, it was hard for her to be able to make much of that.

_Well, maybe another book will help me take my mind off of it_ , Luz thought. Luz absentmindedly reached over to her pile and picked up the first book she touched. Hopefully, it would be one of the thicker books Amity picked out for her and make it easy for her to forget her troubles.

"Wait, what's this?" The book Luz was holding looked nothing like any of the books Amity picked out for her. It bore some resemblance to the manga Luz had picked out for herself thanks to the illustrated characters on the cover, but the characters—a green-haired witch holding a white staff, an elderly woman dressed in red and black, and a bipedal wolf—didn't have the same art style as the ones from the manga.

" _The Good Witch Azura_? Ugh, this book is the worst. Nothing but cheesy, overwritten schlock with violence that barely counts as gratuitous. Why'd you get _this_?" King asked.

"I didn't check this out; the manga were the only books I got for fun. Well, unless you count the fun of self-education, of course."

"I do not."

"Disappointing, but we're getting off track. Where did this—Wait a minute. The size of the book, and the color of the back cover—Amity! This is the book Amity was carrying around with her! It must have gotten mixed up with mine at some point. I can't believe neither one of us noticed."

"I can't believe that uptight library girl actually reads garbage like this. That is just hi _lar_ ious!" Eda said with a laugh. King soon joined in, and through it all, Luz just sat on the couch feeling confused. After a few minutes of that, they stopped laughing and Eda said that they should all get ready for bed because of how late it was getting. Eda headed upstairs, King carried the rest of his ice cream off to wherever it was he slept, and Luz, wanting to do a little more reading, stayed on the couch.

_I say that, but what do I even want to read?_ Luz asked herself. _Not really in the mood to read more instructional guides or theses, and I think I've had my fill of Demon Realm history for the night. I could read the manga, but I already read two out of five, and it'd probably be good to pace myself on those._ Luz's eyes fell back onto _The Good Witch Azura_. Eda and King both said that it was a terrible book, and nothing about it made it look like it had anything Luz was interested in, but if even someone like Amity could find something to like about it, then there wasn't any reason why Luz couldn't do the same.

If nothing else, it could at least be entertainingly bad and give her something to laugh at before she went to bed.

* * *

Amity didn't get an ounce of sleep the previous night; understandable, considering that her entire life was in danger of unraveling at the seams. So many years dedicated to making sure she could stand above her peers, so many years devastating anyone who stood in the way of her path to excellence, regardless of whether or not they deserved it, so many years devoted to following every task her parents set out for her down to the tiniest detail, and it was all on the verge of ruin thanks to a misplaced book, of all things. Suffice to say, she had hardly seen that coming.

She was still kicking herself for not noticing that she had left her copy of _The Good Witch Azura_ behind until after she had returned home and wasn't allowed to go out for the rest of the day. Losing her book was one thing, but the real problem was that she knew for a fact that she couldn't have lost it until after she left the Kid's Corner to help the human girl pick out books. That meant she had to have left her book in a section of the library that anyone who knew anything about Amity would know that she frequented regularly, so if anyone from school found the book, knew about her extra credit work and noticed the signs of wear and occasional margin notes, it wouldn't be impossible for them to conclude that it was her book; God forbid if Boscha or one of her siblings ended up being the one to find it, as that would make it impossible for her to even entertain the possibility of salvaging the situation.

Her scroll hadn't been flooded with hundreds of messages mocking her for liking something as childish as _The Good Witch Azura_ , so that could only mean that no one had found the book and it was still in the library. With how notoriously bad the library staff was at cleaning up on weekends, she couldn't count on it being on a shelf or at the front desk, so she needed to be at the library the second it opened so she could find the book before anyone she knew did. Whether or not she would burn the library to the ground out of frustration at the end of it all was still up in the air, of course.

"Amity!" Right before her was someone she had also thought about burning to the ground. Luz, the human girl who bothered her time and time again from the moment they first met, the reason why she lost her book in the first place, and now, as it turned out, someone more than capable of surprising her so much that she would fall flat on her back. "Sorry! Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Amity said as she picked herself up, the statement true enough for her to work with. "What are you doing here, human?"

"I have been waiting all night to talk to you again, and I figured I would succeed because you seemed like the exact kind of person who would be at a library first thing in the morning on a Sunday," Luz said, stepping out of the bush she had surprised Amity from. "I wasn't waiting for you there, though. I've only been there for about four hours."

"You've been up since four in the morning? Why?"

"I always wake up that early. You never know when you'll have to suddenly rob a treasury blimp that suddenly entered your air path or get into a biplane to escape a rival crew of sky pirates trying to get the drop on you."

"I don't understand any of—Why have you been waiting around for me?"

" _This_ is why!" Luz reached into a bag strung against her chest and pulled out a book. Amity felt her heart stop when she saw that the book was _The Good Witch Azura_. "Looks like someone got their book mixed up with mine. And people say _I'm_ clumsy."

_I'm going to kill her_ , Amity thought. _I knew this girl was going to be nothing but trouble, but I let myself get distracted by how she did one nice thing for me. I'm paying the price for that, and now I have to kill her before it gets even worse. Or do I? She didn't tell anyone about the book, so she must want something from me. I know she likes money, so she must be trying to blackmail me for a hefty bribe. Yeah, that must be it. I gotta do what I can to keep it as low as possible, low enough for Mother and Father to not notice that anything's missing from their accounts, and if that doesn't work and she tries to make more demands,_ then _I can think about—_

"This is one of the best books I've ever read." Luz interrupted Amity's train of thought with a seemingly impossible and incomprehensible statement.

"R-Really?" Amity stammered out.

"Yeah! I usually avoid fantasy because I like sci-fi more, but this book is so amazing that I was up all night reading it! The characters are all so fun, even the villains in a 'love to hate' kind of way."

"Uh-huh."

"Azura is so cool the way she takes charge of everything and doesn't let anyone try and tell her that she can't do something."

"Uh-huh."

"And the writing. The writing! Most of it is super flowery, but it feels like that's intentional, and it does a great job of establishing the tone of the story, as a whole."

"Exactly! A lot of critics complain about the writing being too cheesy, but that's just the kind of world they live in, and once you accept that, you're able to see how much it all flows together and creates a great narrative!"

"That's what I was thinking! I'm so glad I wasn't alone on that!"

"Yeah, well—" Amity stopped herself short as she took stock of the situation. Twice now, the human girl had made herself out to be some sort of antagonistic force; twice now, Amity had fallen into the human girl's flow the second the proved herself to be anything but; twice now, Amity had found herself enjoying getting caught up in Luz's nonsense. Logically, something like that would be even worse than someone finding out that she liked _The Good Witch Azura_ , but for some reason, she didn't hate it.

"I still can't believe it ended with that big cliffhanger, though. How could the story end without making it clear how Azura would help Miserina the Decrepit get her magic back? And what about Hecate's burgeoning allegiance to the Chaos Magistrate? Not to mention the implications that Gildersnake is still alive that just weren't followed up on."

"All of that _does_ get followed up on, though. In the first chapter of the next book, Hecate finds the discarded scales of Gildersnake and—No, I'm saying too—"

"There's another book?" Before Amity knew it, Luz was uncomfortably wedged into her personal space. "How long has there been another book for?"

"Since it was published? There are four books in the series, actually, plus some movies and—"

"Four books? It's a series? It's a whole franchise? Do you have the rest of it? Can I borrow it?" With each question, Luz wedged herself further and further into Amity's personal space, and eventually, she just had to jump back and catch her breath.

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, and _no_ ," Amity said, emphasizing her point by taking her book back from Luz.

"Oh, okay," Luz said, her tone of voice coming off as a bit downtrodden. "Well, can we at least talk about the book?"

"Also no." Luz opened her mouth to speak, but Amity threw out a finger to silence her. "I'm completely caught up with the series, so it would be annoying for me to try and discuss it as if I've only read the first book. You've got money, use it to at least by the next three books, and after you read them, we can discuss them. In a secluded location where no one will see us."

"Can do! I don't have one of those scroll things for you to call, and I didn't bring a radio or a walkie talkie for us to use, but if I just keep coming back here, I'll run into you again, right?" Amity nodded her head. "Great! See you then!" Luz gave her a salute, rubbed her forehead because she hit herself with her metal arm, and ran off while waving goodbye to her.

Amity slapped herself in the face when she caught herself attempting to wave back. Whatever tricks Luz had at her disposal weren't to be trifled with, even if she didn't hate them as much as she wanted to.


End file.
